National Quality Standards in Education (3-16)​, with clear success criteria, have been developed with stakeholders. They articulate a shared national understanding of school quality and so provide a basis for aligning internal and external review processes as outlined in the NCF (2012:32) “Quality Assurance is to be realised through a system of ongoing self-evaluation, monitoring and review within sch​ools complemented by an external review system that together foster school improvement.” This attempts to create a balance between autonomy and accountability and between a centralised and decentralised system of quality assurance mechanisms.