Excellence, improvement, and HMIe's new six-point scale

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education in Scotland (HMIe) recently redesigned its evaluation scale for use in its inspections, with the stated purposes of highlighting and recognising excellence, and creating a more discriminating scale, better able to track improvement over time. The role of HMIe in promoting improvement in educational provision has been emphasised in recent years and this paper offers an analysis of the new evaluation scale in the light of that aspect of HMIe's functions. It identifies some inherent difficulties with the scale both in terms of its definition of'excellence' and of its efficacy in motivating improvement. The paper concludes by considering the broader issue of the extent to which the current system of inspection can be seen to be functioning in a formative way to promote improvement in educational provision.