career development and support in the context of curriculum change; school-designed
assessment and reporting to parents; use of standardized assessment and state certificate
examinations; and program evaluations focusing on aspects of curriculumprovision and
system evaluation through international surveys of attainment. In the Netherlands, the
national government has implemented legislation to promote good governance of
schools; schools are required to have separate mechanisms in place for the administration
and internal supervision in the school. The Inspectorate of Education aligns its
inspections to the activities of school boards and internal supervisors. In Styria, school
inspectors are even responsible for implementing some of these additional quality
assurance measures as they have additional tasks in leading, planning and coordinating
schools. These mechanisms are designed to govern the chain of processes that link
school inspections to their intended outcomes of promoting good education. In this
paper, however, we focus only on assumptions about explicit and direct connections that
can be made between the inspection characteristics and outcomes.