Good education is of major public interest. Governments consider its quality as one of their most important responsibilities, and use educational supervision - as tool for accountability and school improvement - as one of their instruments. Because young people develop in more than one domain, the goals of education are multifaceted and include both cognitive and social development. Educational goals in the social domain are expressed in curricula, but mostly not evaluated on a regular basis.
Is it possible to measure the social outcomes of education and evaluate the 'social quality' of schools? Can school inspectorates assess the effectiveness of the work done by schools in this respect and can school inspections strengthen school improvement?
Some national school inspectorates have already included (aspects of) social outcomes in their assessment schemes. Their experiences provide an insight in the possibilities of the measurement of social quality. The analyses presented in this book are based on experiences in some of these countries - the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Sweden - and use insights from scientific research about the social outcomes of education and effective educational supervision.
The study describes what the approaches for inspecting educational quality in the social domain may be, and what contributions and effects may be expected of them. It provides the building blocks to answer the question about effective organization of assessment and school inspection for accountability and school improvement in the social domain.