From inspection of schools to quality assurance in schools? External quality assurance for school improvement in a post-colonial micro-state: Malta.

Abstract

School inspection has been a feature of Maltese state education for 172 years, soon after the start of British colonial rule in Malta in 1800. It was an integral part of the uncritical educational policy transfer at the time, and was suffused with the colonial rhetoric of panoptical central control and paternalistic oversight. However by the 1990s this panoptical paradigm of school inspection was increasingly being challenged. Malta’s 2006 Education Act represents a watershed in Maltese education with its focus on quality education and quality assurance across all education sectors, including compulsory education. This new discourse is strikingly different from the “choice, transparency and accountability” discourse of the marketisation of education that transformed school inspection in England from the 1980s to today. This paper discusses how and why this latter-day policy translation did not occur, and proposes that this is due to Malta’s post-colonial micro-state reality.