Lower Saxony school inspection
The Lower Saxony School Inspection is subordinate to the Lower Saxony Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs and until the end of 2010 was located in the castle in Bad Iburg .
description
Lower Saxony was the first federal state to introduce an independent, comprehensive school inspection for all types of schools from May 1, 2005, based on a cabinet resolution of April 19, 2005. It is part of the school inspection, but its evaluation tasks are organizationally and personally separated from the school inspection in the narrower sense. The aim of the inspection is to improve the quality of schools. The school inspection is also known as an external evaluation . It thus complements the internal evaluation with a self-evaluation instrument such as SEIS or comprehensive quality management such as B. EFQM .
The NSchI was dissolved on December 31, 2010, the tasks of the school inspection in Lower Saxony have been performed by the Lower Saxony State Institute for School Quality Development (NLQ) - Department 2 (evaluation and school inspection) since January 1, 2011 . This new authority was created by merging the Nds. School Inspectorate and Nds. State Office for Teacher Education and School Development (NiLS). The new authority is based in Hildesheim.
All public schools in the State of Lower Saxony are regularly included in the school inspection, in the initial inspection on the basis of a decree of April 7, 2006. The first inspection round (inventory) was completed in November 2012. The staff of the inspection teams - teachers of all types of schools with management experience - have been specially qualified through further training.
Initial inspection
The schools to be inspected were selected at random . The schools could not avoid the inspection, they were obliged to cooperate and were informed six to eight weeks before the inspection date.
The inspection of a school was essentially based on four sources of information gathering and evaluation:
- Data and document analysis (annual statistics over four years, school process descriptions, school activities, press reviews, etc.)
- Lesson observations with standardized observation sheets, the content of which was made known to all teachers. After the inspection, the arches were destroyed.
- Interviews with the groups involved in the school (school management, teachers, students, parents and, if applicable, companies at vocational schools)
- School tour through the buildings and the school grounds.
The inspection teams prepared a written report on their multi-day school attendance, which was handed over to the schools, the school authorities and the school inspectorate. The inspection report should provide the school with a well-founded indication of the quality improvement and further development of the school's work. A public ranking of the schools inspected was not planned.
A follow-up inspection was carried out if schools performed poorly in the initial inspection, ie if eight or more of the 15 assessed criteria or more than two of the four teaching criteria were rated as “weak” or “rather weak than strong”. Up to 2008 this affected about five percent of all schools inspected up to then, in 2010 this percentage was seven percent.
Advanced inspection procedure
At the beginning of 2013, the Lower Saxony School Inspection entered the pilot phase of a further developed procedure. Different inspection modes and focuses were tested during the pilot phase. A procedure that has been modified compared to the initial inspection and that follows a continuously dialogical approach has been developed.
Some elements of the initial inspection, such as For example, viewing lessons are retained in the further development, but many aspects have been discarded, changed or newly added based on the experience from the first inspection round. The most important innovations are the dialogical approach of the procedure, the concentration on a few selected areas and the concentration on the process character of all school tasks.
The basis of the inspection is the core task model . In this model, six school fields of action are defined ("managing schools", "controlling school development", "designing educational offers", "developing cooperation", "observing results and successes"), each of which is assigned an average of four core tasks. A total of 21 core tasks are defined in the model. As part of a school inspection, up to seven core tasks are considered and inspected. In contrast to the initial inspection, the inspection process does not provide a comprehensive picture of the school. During the various pilot phases, some five and some six core tasks were determined to be inspected. The selection of these core tasks was predominantly determined by the inspection; the school to be inspected was able to determine a few core tasks itself (partly from a limited selection). The core task model (2013) is based on the orientation framework for school quality (2003, further development in 2006). It picks up quality features and places them in a process-oriented context. The decree on the further developed school inspection came into force on August 1, 2014.
The further developed inspection procedure is understood as a dialogical procedure. The central instrument is the quality assessment in schools (QES), which is recorded with the help of software. In preparing for the inspection, the school assesses itself in the areas of activity under consideration and substantiates this assessment with appropriate references to supporting procedures, documents, etc. In contrast to the first inspection procedure, the type and number of data and documents to be sent with which the Information is substantiated, not specified. Together with the named documents (e.g. concepts, protocols, process and procedure descriptions), the self-assessment is sent to the team of inspectors, who then develop and formulate their own view of the school on the basis of the documents provided before going to school. During the school visit, the inspection team talks to the school management, teachers, students and parents (duration approx. 90 minutes each). In these discussions, the areas of activity that were inspected are considered and thus the view of the inspectors, which was recorded in the school's self-assessment in preparation for school attendance, is expanded, supplemented or revised.
An important final result of the school inspection is the assessment of the individual core tasks considered. The main criterion is the assessment of the process quality (thus of the process management ) in the respective areas. An assessment can be made in four levels: Basic requirements are not met; the process is developed; the process is in place; the process is secured. To explain the results in the fields of action, schools receive a description of the strengths and areas of improvement perceived by the team of inspectors. Together with the school management, approaches for possible follow-up action are formulated in a so-called comparison meeting.
In addition to the results from the assessment of the process quality, statistical data from the class observations that take place during the inspection visit are presented as a further result . A new lesson observation sheet (UBB) for Lower Saxony has been developed for the further developed inspection procedure. In the future, this form should also be used in other observation situations outside of the school inspection, for example during peer observation. During the inspection, class observations are carried out by an inspector. He remains in one class for about 20 minutes, so that two classes or teachers can be visited in a regular 45-minute lesson. Only at the beginning of a school inspection does the entire inspection team visit a complete school lesson together for the so-called calibration (i.e. the coordination of the work with the assessment sheet).
In contrast to the first inspection procedure, there is no longer a school tour through the buildings and the school premises. These aspects no longer have any influence on the inspection result. There are also no more follow-up inspections. The inspection report (consisting of the assessment of the process quality as well as statistics of the lesson observation) is handed over to the respective school; the responsible school department head also receives these results.