Good School/Bad School: paradox and fabrication.

This paper, drawn from an ESRC-funded research project, deploys data from one secondary school to raise some general times about the development of disciplinary technologies of surveillance and uses of performance in education. It is argued that the use of Total Quality Management, school Development Planning and ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education) Inspections, individually and collectively produce an intensification of teachers' work, submit teachers more directly to the 'gaze' of policy, and encourage schools and teachers to 'fabricate' themselves for the purposes of evaluation and comparison The paper is premised on the argument that schools cannot be represented adequately within research (or evaluation) by simple stones or single essentialising tags, `good/bad', `successful/failing'-they are inherently paradoxical institutions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]