Risk-based school inspections in the Netherlands: A critical reflection on intended effects and causal mechanisms

This paper compares and contrasts the program theory of the reenacted Supervision Act to the Supervision Act of 2003. We describe how the expectations about how schools should be inspected, the effect such inspections are expected to have, and how these effects should be realized have changed over the past years as a result of changing paradigms of governance and the supervision of schools. An ex ante evaluation of the program theory shows that the changed inspection methods are likely to be less effective compared to the previous paradigm