 I always describe it as a process where information is gathered and analysed on, for example, school inputs, processes and outcomes, which could be the quality of teaching and learning or student learning outcomes and that can be analysed for both teachers, classrooms or schools and on an aggregated level even for looking at district or system level quality and that information is collected by actors and those can be both internal to the school such as teachers, school leaders or school boards even or it can be collected externally by school inspectors or supervisors on the district level for example and that collection of information can be done through various devices such as testing, lesson observation or document analysis and the purpose of all that is to make informed decisions, decisions on which on how to improve the school, where improvement is needed, how to improve teaching in the classroom or perhaps organise assessment differently or organise the school differently with the purpose of improving student learning outcomes, it can also inform decision making on the system level such as where national governments of education use that level, that aggregated information from schools to decide on where resources need to be allocated and it can also inform parental school choice such as when inspectors of education publish reports on school quality and parents use that information to decide on a school for their children so a very broad term that captures various types of evaluation but this framework really allows us to understand the key elements of what quality assurance includes so before the pandemic we already saw move to more emphasis on school evaluation how that was included in external inspection increasingly where inspectors of education would use that information to to judge school quality we also saw of a move towards more an improvement a role of inspectors of education more so than control and an intense use of data in evaluations as well we've also seen the development of peer-to-peer models where schools would evaluate each other's work and where that would feed into external inspections the conversations that we've had with in external inspectors of education is that they expect to prolong that function particularly because schools are currently facing such challenges in also reducing potential achievement gaps addressing issues around inequality and where a sole control function is just not considered feasible in reducing those gaps and obviously what we mean by support here is not that inspectors of education are providing advice to schools on how they should improve but support should be considered more broadly in terms of sharing good practice providing evaluated feedback whereas the school would decide on how to specifically use that information so there's quite a lot of talk about building back a better system in response to the pandemic where good practices in schools are sustained through evaluation and some of those good practices would be where schools have actually developed high quality models of blended teaching and learning where they've also improved what we call educational partnerships with parents home school partnerships where they've also kind of invested in developing students executive skills where they would be able to self-regulate your learning much better what we also see is that given the concerns over high inequality potential learning loss and concerns over well-being of students these issues cannot be addressed by schools alone it requires partnerships with parents to begin with but also with other parents with other partners in a local context such as those providing youth services for example there's this great saying that goes it takes a village to raise a child and that really highlights the relevance of including partnerships and evaluation as well