Inspection + education = support

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Miguel Ángel Tirado

I am an education inspector. Yet there is one word not always readily associated with educational inspection: support. Education inspectors have long been associated in teachers’ minds with control, scrutiny and bureaucratic oversight rather than assistance. For many teachers and school leadership teams, the arrival of the inspector is still perceived as the intervention of an external figure, somewhat removed from the daily reality of classroom life, whose principal task is to verify compliance with regulations, examine documentation or detect irregularities.

To some extent, this perception is understandable. The very history of educational inspection helps explain why its supervisory role has traditionally enjoyed greater visibility than its advisory one (1). Yet this raises a simple but important question: what purpose does educational inspection serve if it does not help improve teaching? And if we accept that helping schools to improve is one of its essential functions, then another question inevitably follows: how can inspection contribute more effectively to that aim?

An education system may produce endless regulations, protocols, strategic plans and documentation while still failing to guarantee what truly matters: that pupils learn. When this happens, inspectors risk becoming more concerned with formal compliance than with the genuine improvement of teaching practices and of the conditions that make learning possible.

Certainly, everyday conflicts, administrative pressures and the growing complexity of education systems absorb a considerable part of our time. Too often, we find ourselves managing immediate urgencies that prevent us from concentrating on what is truly essential: how teaching takes place and how pupils learn. Yet we should not lose sight of the bigger picture. And in education, that bigger picture remains learning itself. For — let us not forget — it is in the classroom that the right to education ultimately becomes real.

Helping does not mean lowering expectations or abandoning technical rigour. Quite the contrary. Professional support requires knowledge, sound judgement and the capacity to guide complex decisions. A doctor helps by making an accurate diagnosis; an architect by identifying a structural weakness before a building deteriorates; an education inspector by helping to identify practices that hinder learning and by guiding improvement processes grounded in evidence and data rather than in pedagogical fashions, false assumptions, intuitions or institutional inertia.

For this reason, educational supervision should not be separated from technical guidance. The two dimensions only make sense together. Supervision that does not help schools understand and improve their practice ultimately degenerates into bureaucracy. Equally, guidance detached from a deep understanding of school realities easily collapses into empty pedagogical rhetoric.

Everything begins to make sense once we view our work through the lens of pupils’ learning, which remains the true raison d’être of the teaching profession — including for those of us engaged in educational inspection. Consider literacy, for example. We know that many educational inequalities emerge very early and are closely linked to unequal access to effective teaching in reading and writing. We also know that difficulties not addressed in the earliest stages of schooling tend to widen over time (2).

If this is the case, it becomes difficult to argue that inspection should limit itself to checking the existence of literacy plans, schemes of work or school projects. The real question is not whether a document exists, but whether pupils are genuinely learning to read and write with sufficient fluency and understanding to gain access to knowledge, participate fully in learning and progress academically.

This is precisely where inspection can become genuinely useful. For inspection, at its core, also involves deciding what deserves attention. And when time is inevitably limited, establishing priorities becomes a professional responsibility. The issue is not simply how much supervision takes place, but where attention is directed and, above all, for what purpose. Inspection plans themselves reflect our priorities and a particular understanding of what matters in education. It is therefore worth asking whether those priorities always correspond to the factors that have the greatest impact on teaching and learning.

From this perspective, the inspector’s role is not to provide magical solutions or replace the work of teachers and school leadership teams, but rather to help schools analyse teaching from a different standpoint: by contributing evidence, encouraging formative reflection on outcomes, fostering methodological agreements, creating spaces for professional reflection and helping to identify which practices are proving effective and which are not. In short, by helping schools to think.

And thinking seriously about teaching is more necessary today than ever before. Contemporary education is marked by multiple and overlapping pressures: growing bureaucracy, organisational overload, regulatory demands, relentless innovation, increasingly complex expectations surrounding inclusion and pedagogical debates that are often deeply polarised. Schools need experienced professionals capable of offering clarity, perspective and sound independent technical judgement. In complex times, inspection must be, more than ever, genuinely educational (3).

For precisely this reason, it is also necessary to rethink the way inspectors engage with schools. Inspection should be more present within learning processes themselves and less exclusively focused on documentation. More concerned with understanding the reality of classroom practice than with applying uniform responses. More capable, ultimately, of generating professional trust — because without trust, meaningful support becomes almost impossible. In other words, inspection must move from merely visiting schools to genuinely working within them.

Naturally, educational inspection cannot and should not abandon its safeguarding role. Part of our responsibility is to ensure that the rights and duties of everyone involved in the educational process are respected and that the system functions properly as a whole. Yet for that very reason, our legitimacy depends not solely on our capacity to monitor and control, but above all on our capacity to contribute meaningfully to the improvement of teaching and, through it, learning itself.

Perhaps this is why we should continue moving towards an understanding of educational inspection that, fortunately, is increasingly shared by many colleagues: inspection understood not merely as supervision, control or verification, but also — and above all — as a form of professional support grounded in knowledge, evidence and expert guidance. To help means contributing to better-founded educational decisions. It means guiding complex processes without reducing them to an administrative checklist. Ultimately, it means placing professional expertise at the service of better education.

Perhaps this is where the true meaning of the simple formula that gives this article its title ultimately resides: educational inspection + education = support. The more genuinely educational inspection becomes, the less it is perceived merely as a mechanism of control and the more it becomes something far more valuable: a tool for improving teaching and helping pupils learn more effectively. For in the end, what else should the quality and equity proclaimed by our educational laws really mean?

References: 

1. On the recent evolution of educational inspection towards models focused on improving teaching and developing professional competences, see:

Vidorreta, C. (2024). Funciones y competencias profesionales de la inspección educativa. Supervisión 21, 72(72). https://doi.org/10.52149/Sp21/72.4

Manso, J. and Barreiro, V. (2024). El desarrollo de la inspección de educación a través de sus competencias profesionales. Supervisión 21, 72(72). https://doi.org/10.52149/Sp21/72.6

2. See, among others, studies summarising research findings on the teaching of reading and writing:

Ripoll Salceda, J. C. (2023). Un marco para el desarrollo de la competencia lectora. Ministry of Education, Vocational Training and Sports. https://www.libreria.educacion.gob.es/libro/un-marco-para-el-desarrollo-de-la-competencia-lectora_183942/

Tirado Ramos, M. A. (2024). Dime cómo lees y te diré cuánto aprendes: ¿Qué nos aporta la investigación a la enseñanza de la lectura? Supervisión 21, 71(71). https://doi.org/10.52149/Sp21/71.8

Tirado Ramos, M. A. (2025). Pensar con lápiz y papel: Aportaciones de la investigación a la enseñanza de la escritura. Supervisión 21, 78(78). https://doi.org/10.52149/Sp21/78.11

3. This approach receives explicit support in the recent Real Decreto 68/2026, de 4 de febrero, por el que se regula la inspección educativa (Royal Decree 68/2026 of 4 February regulating educational inspection). Among the aims of the inspection function, Article 5 expressly refers to the need to “improve the education system and the quality and equity of teaching” (Art. 5.d). Likewise, its functions include both “supervising teaching practice and school leadership, and contributing to their continuous improvement” (Art. 6.b) and “advising, guiding and informing the different sectors of the educational community” (Art. 6.g).

Real Decreto 68/2026, de 4 de febrero, por el que se regula la inspección educativa. Boletín Oficial del Estado [Official State Gazette], No. 32, 5 February 2026. https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2026-2622

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons