These reported declines in student achievement results may point to unintended
negative consequences of school inspections. Such negative consequences may occur
when schools implement procedures and protocols that have no effect on primary
processes in the school but just aim at receiving a positive inspection evaluation. In
effect, this means a (usually unintended) undue emphasis on the elements that are
assessed. Schools focus for example on programming a large number of lesson hours
instead of trying to improve the quality of lessons offered (when the inspection rubric
only measures the number of lesson hours) or they pursue short-term targets at the
expense of legitimate long-term objectives. Or again schools may construct selfevaluation
instruments to score positively on inspection indicators used for measuring
quality assurance, instead of implementing such instruments to improve the quality of
their education. These types of behaviours may negatively affect student
achievement.