School effectiveness must be performed and be visible. Test, exam and inspection effectiveness measures (discussed in Chapter 6) depend on a top-down view – funders examine data assembled from various measurements of providers and provision. But governments too are expected to be transparent, their doings open to public scrutiny. A bottom-up view occurs when the public are able to access policies, reports and data that they can use to make their own judgments about government effectiveness. The ‘gaze’ goes both ways.

The downward funder view can be helpfully traced back to the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham designed a Panopticon – a prison built on the principle of centralised inspection. A circular building afforded the prison governor, or a deputised warden sitting in a tower, a view of every prisoner. Although the omnipotent watcher was invisible, prisoners knew they were watched and managed their own behaviour to avoid punishment. Discipline depended on prisoner internalisation of rules, via the application of surveillance. While Bentham's prison was never built in exactly the way that he imagined it, the panoptic gaze has, according to Foucault, become the dominant way in which modern societies are governed and populations disciplined. Recent sophisticated digital platforms and algorithms have provided new panoptic avenues for government to ‘see’ and monitor a range of public, institutional and private behaviours. They have also afforded sousveillance: the means for people to see themselves through a range of calculating devices.

Bentham also believed it was possible for there to be common interests and common cause between elected rulers and subjects. This depended on two-way accountability: his top-down gaze was matched by a bottom-up equivalent.