In what I believe is the first move of its kind to date, the Department of Education in Ireland has published a set of school inspection reports.
Having recently become a parent myself, this is something that will become near and dear to my heart in the next few years. I feel that we need much more transparency in our public services, and so view this development as a positive one. The reports currently available are only for a relatively small number of schools, but I’m sure that it will be kept up-to-date as new inspections are carried out and reports written.
One thing that I notice, however, is that there are no marks or scores attached to the reports (at least on the ones that I’ve read). The reports themselves conclude with a section highlighting the strengths of the school being examined (or the particular subject area being examined), and follow that with a list of bullet points that have a set of recommendations that are “a means of building on these strengths and to address areas for development”.
I can’t help wondering if there are scores attached to these reports, but that they are not being made available, or if they don’t exist at all.
As an aside, the DoE website was at an absolute crawl yesterday, which was when the reports were released. I can only assume that that was because of the number of parents trying to download the reports. If so, it definitely proves that there’s a demand for this kind of information.
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