This work divides into three parts. Part one is concerned with the worldwide growth of an evaluative culture in recent decades. In many areas of life, but particularly in the public services and even more particularly in education, there has been an intense push to develop systems of accountability and increasing concerns with obtaining ‘value for money’. In the opening chapters the roots of this movement are explored. The chapters in part two explore in the context of part one the emergence of a new system of school inspection and evaluation in Ireland which is entitled Whole School Evaluation. It is argued that even though this model has been influenced by the international growth of evaluation and accountability systems its development and operation in Ireland has been heavily constrained by tradition and political context. A key element of this new system of Whole School Evaluation is the emphasis placed on school and teacher self-evaluation that is to say schools and teachers developing the capacity to systematically research their own activities and produce evidence to support their professional judgements. However the research conducted and reported in chapter six indicates that, in reality, there is little such self-evaluative capacity in the system and that work must urgently be undertaken to develop this. Part three of the work describes one such project. It shows beyond doubt that practitioners quickly come to see immense developmental potential and possibilities of empowerment through the process of investigating their own practice in a structured and data led manner. This has also been shown to be true in other similar projects. Unfortunately research also shows that these processes are hard to sustain since isolation and lack of ongoing motivation seems to gradually erode early enthusiasm for reflection and self study. The case made in this work is that a very promising solution to this problem is to be found in the creation of sustained communities of practice using increasingly cheap and easy to access Virtual Learning Environments. In summary then the blended approach to programme delivery proposed provides a vehicle or platform through which the collegiality and mutual reinforcement which are key to sustaining self-evaluation can be provided.