This book provides an analysis of how inspection teams evaluate schools – especially how they decide on assigning scores. It shows how the governance of schools through evaluation is enacted pragmatically. With its focus on the practice of evaluation by a group of external experts, it contributes to the expanding interdisciplinary field devoted to studying phenomena of the ‘evaluation society’ spanning from assessment research to programme evaluation, from the psychology of decision-making to the sociology of valuation and evaluation.

Additionally, it argues that official...