Governing by Inspection: School Inspection and Education Governance in Scotland, England and Sweden (ESRC RES-062-23-2241-A). I am deeply

Inspection has been identified as one the forms of ‘governing at a distance’ associated with the rise of what has been variously defined as audit culture, audit society, performance management, the evaluative state or the competitive-evaluative nexus (see Strathern, 2000; Power, 1997; Pollitt et al, 1999; Neave, 1998 and Clarke, 2005). It takes its place alongside a battery of other technologies and practices that address the problem of governing organisations indirectly. Inspection appears to be a practice invented by nineteenth century European states to enable surveillance of problematic – or potentially problematic – sites and practices. In England, for example, inspectorates were established to deal with a variety of public functions (prisons and police as well as schooling) and with sites of public concern (the factory inspectorate, for example). Inspectors represented a form of embodied expertise, with powers of access to otherwise closed settings (whether the prison or the school), and a responsibility to report publicly on their findings. Inspection is then, from the outset, a very particular form of governmental practice, involving distinctive boundary crossing powers, based on a conception of expert observation and inquiry, and discharging defined sets of public responsibilities through investigations and reports. Inspectors were both part of the state, yet were endowed with a certain independence from departmental structures – they were always marked as Her/His Majesty’s Inspectors. Their persistence into contemporary state formations and governmental arrangements is itself a puzzle, one which