Pre-school education in Portugal: effects of external evaluation on public and private institutions

Abstract

The Portuguese law nº31/2002, of 20th December started a new way of seeing education through external evaluation (Stufflebeam, 2003). With an outsider look, an external team started to help public schools to improve their services by pointing their fragilities but also its stronger points leading each school to find a way to self-improve (Sobrinho, 2003). By the same time, private schools started their own process of evaluation. Different schools are being evaluated by different organizations with similar objectives (but not the same). In the 2000 decade, external evaluation has become a common procedure in every public school and in consequence preschool education is now far more recognised than before (Pacheco, Seabra, Morgado & van Hattum, 2014). The empirical studies we are undertaking attempt to find out what was the impact of external evaluation in both institutions – public and private. To accomplish this objective we decided for a qualitative study based upon content analysis of documents and interviews (Bogdan & Biklen, 1999). The interviews were made to directors and preschool teachers of public and private schools from S. João da Madeira. Despite the preliminary results, we can say that external evaluation gave a great contribution to preschool education prominence either in public as in private institution. If public preschools are pointed as a reference in articulation with other school levels and in curriculum sequence, private schools evaluation leans towards efficiency and accountability criteria.