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

► Inspections should lead to good education/governance of schools through targeted inspections, communicated to school boards. ► Ex ante evaluation shows that these assumptions are well defined, but to some extent inconsistent. ► Ex ante evaluation shows the empirical value of the assumptions and points to additional requirements to meeting this goal. 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.