A mandatory probationary year for newly qualified teachers in conjunction with teacher registration is to be introduced in Sweden from 1st July 2012 (Government Bill 2010/11:20). This reform requires newly qualified teachers to be supported by a mentor. During the probationary year, head teachers will be responsible for evaluating whether the teacher should be registered or not. This paper reports on an interview study that was conducted with nine Swedish head teachers concerning what kind of teacher competencies they would focus on when evaluating NQTs and how they would perform the evaluation.

The results show that the head teachers would primarily like to focus on the following competencies of an NQT: (a) social interaction, (b) leadership and classroom management, and (c) mission and goal achievement. General pedagogical skills were mostly emphasised, whereas issues like subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge seemed to be taken for granted.

The question of how the evaluation should be performed has two distinct dimensions: how to acquire information about NQTs competencies, which relates to technical issues of how information and impressions are made available for evaluation and how head teachers perceive, interpret, assess and evaluate what they see, hear and feel. As the latter, more elusive dimension involves cognitive and procedural aspects of evaluation, the head teachers involved in the study found it difficult to describe and explain.