The origin and development of external evaluation in Iceland from 1990-2016

Abstract

The aim of this study is to bring out a better understanding about how external evaluation/inspection of compulsory schools has come about in Icelandic educational policy and legal frameworks and to discuss the developments of the external evaluation/inspection from the beginning to the present. The research questions which guide the study are as follows:

1. How did external evaluation/inspection of compulsory schools in Iceland come about and what explains its origin?
2. How has external evaluation/inspection of compulsory schools developed to the present and what explains its development?

The research is rooted in theories of agenda-setting, research of public administration and theories of policy implementation and change management.

The research is a qualitative case study, primarily based on documentary analysis of published documents and data from interviews taken in 2015 with eleven key informants who had participated in the policy settings or the development being studied.

The findings indicate that the initial policy to conduct external school evaluation/inspection can be attributed to international trends in public administration known as ‘new public management’ that took place in many countries from the 1980s. Part of the new public management was the devolution of government services and authority to lower levels of government, increased school autonomy and greater accountability for outcome. All these factors did affect the increased emphasis on evaluation and monitoring in Iceland and internationally. In Iceland, the municipalities took over the operation of schools at the compulsory level in 1996. According to the Compulsory School Act of 1995, the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture was responsible for regular evaluation of the educational system.

Despite intention in educational policy from the early 1990s to start regular external evaluation in Iceland, it was not implemented. Instead, the focus was on the implementation of schools’ self-evaluation/internal evaluation, where each compulsory school was required to systematically evaluate the quality of school activities. At five-year intervals, the schools’ self-evaluation methods were subject to external assessment and validation.

The findings suggest that the obstacles for introducing external evaluation in Iceland at this time were, in particular, that the authorities and stakeholders were not convinced of its urgency—it would have required the establishment of a school inspectorate, the devising of the evaluation, and the development of the skills to perform the evaluation. The evaluation of all Icelandic schools would also be very costly. Moreover, the government had the belief that local authorities should be responsible for the quality of their schools.

It was not until the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century that comprehensive external evaluation of schools, in order to promote school improvements, started in Iceland. A greater sense of urgency to evaluate the quality of schools at the national level had arisen, as well as governmental expectations of more responsibility for quality improvement in schools at the municipal level.

According to the Compulsory School Act of 2008, both the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and the municipalities are responsible for carrying out external evaluations of compulsory schools and school activities. The act is, however, not clear about how this responsibility is distributed between these two parties. A committee was established in order to reduce overlap of evaluation activities and assess the possibility of cooperation between those two levels. The committee provided recommendations for cooperation between the Ministry and the municipalities on external evaluation of compulsory schools and stressed the importance of regular evaluation of school activities.

During the first three years, from 2010 to 2012, external evaluation was conducted by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. In 2013, the cooperation project on external evaluation was initiated, and at the same time supervision was moved from the Ministry to the Educational Testing Institute. In 2015, a new agency was established: the Directorate of Education, which took over the task of the Institute. A four-year pilot project to test this cooperation was set to finish at the end of 2016. At the time of writing, the pilot project was in its final year and its further development remained unclear.