School inspection is back. And, naturally, so is the debate about whether or not Scottish education really benefits from it.

Inspection was suspended in Scotland as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. That suspension was announced in March 2020 and now, after an 18-month hiatus - and
not a single inspection carried out in 2020-21 - schools once again face the prospect of an inspector calling from January.

Education Scotland has said that this will be a phased return to inspection, with inspectors initially prioritising schools that already had an inspection in the pipeline until December. It said it would visit schools and settings to which, before the pandemic hit, it had made a commitment to return for a further inspection. Inspectors are to “explore the progress schools have made since their original inspection as well as the impact Covid-19 has had, and the positive steps that they have and are taking during the recovery period”.

Now Tes Scotland has discovered that the body’s intention is to carry out about 90 visits before the end of 2021 and then to carry out at least 120 inspections between January and June 2022, or 210 inspections in total. There were 252 inspections carried out in 2018-19 - the last full year of uninterrupted inspection - but the previous year, just 182 inspections were undertaken.

What is the purpose of school inspections in Scotland?

So, inspection might be being phased back in, but it will be happening quickly.

All this has prompted an angry response from Scotland’s biggest teaching union, the EIS. Responding to the initial announcement - before the figures on the number of inspections to be carried out came to light - it said the move showed the government and Education Scotland to be “deeply out of touch with the reality that schools are facing”, specifically record levels of pupil and teacher absence

General secretary Larry Flanagan said that reintroducing inspection in the midst of a pandemic was “somewhat nonsensical” and would “detract attention from the priority
at hand” - education recovery.

Instead of inspecting schools, he said that “Education Scotland’s efforts should be channelled firmly in the direction of supporting schools as they continue to respond to the Covid crisis”.

For its part, Education Scotland is trying to make the reintroduction of school inspection more palatable by saying that there will be a particular focus on “the impact of the pandemic and the actions the school has taken and continues to take to support recovery and improvement”.

The implication is that the inspection process will actually aid recovery; however, following the visit, inspectors will publish a report.

And it is probably this aspect of inspection - its very public nature - that makes it so difficult for many teachers and headteachers to embrace it.

Obviously, the argument for publishing inspection findings is based on the fact that schools get public money and should be publicly accountable. But how much use
are the reports that Education Scotland publishes to the public or to parents?

Inspection had been ramped up just before the pandemic. As mentioned above, figures obtained for a Tes Scotland article published in January 2020 showed that 252 inspections were carried out in 2018-19 - a rise of 38 per cent on the previous year, when 182 inspections were undertaken, and the highest number since 2010-11, when the total was 279.

Yet, even with a higher rate of inspection, most schools are still unlikely to be inspected more than once every 10 years.

Also, if an inspection report is more than five years old, Education Scotland now removes it from its website. This decision was made after heads expressed concern about parents reading out-of-date reports.

In reality, the purpose of inspection is not so much about providing up-to-date information on individual schools but to sample at least 250 schools a year to take
the temperature of how well the education system is performing. That information is then fed into the National Improvement Framework. What is less clear is how it is then acted upon.

There is consensus that there is a lot of good practice in Scottish education but
that this needs to be shared to improve consistency. It’s clear that an organisation staffed by people who spend their time visiting schools across the country should have something to offer here.

The EIS has long argued that education authorities should be inspected, not individual schools, to ascertain whether each local council actually has the capacity to support its schools to improve.

Of course, this change of focus from schools to councils could yet come to pass. Inspection is set to be removed from Education Scotland following the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development review of Curriculum for Excellence report published in June, and an expert panel has been established to make recommendations on the national structures that are needed to “facilitate the development and enhancement of our education system for the future”.

So if teachers, heads and unions don’t see the value of the system that we have, this is an opportunity to shape what inspection will look like in the future - or even to make the case for getting rid of it for good.

Emma Seith is a reporter at Tes Scotland . She tweets @Emma_Seith