Total Quality Management in Education

Edward Sallis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135725358
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text has been written for managers in higher education as well as for headteachers and deputy heads in the school sector.;"Total quality management" (TQM) is a philosophy and a methodology that is widely used in business, and increasingly in education, to manage change or other processes. With the pressure for change and quality in education never more acute, this book provides an opportunity for readers in education to acquaint themselves with TQM.;Revised and updated, this edition introduces the key concepts of TQM in the education context. It discusses organizational, leadership and teamwork issues and the tools and techniques of TQM. This text should help educators develop a framework for quality management in their school, college, department or university.

1 Basics

‘Quality is about passion and pride.’

Tom Peters and Nancy Austin, A Passion for Excellence

Quality is at the top of most agendas and improving quality is probably the most important task facing any institution. However, despite its importance, many people find quality an enigmatic concept. It is perplexing to define and often difficult to measure. One person’s idea of quality often conflicts with another and, as we are all too aware, no two experts ever come to the same conclusion when discussing what makes an excellent school, college or university.

The message of quality

We all know quality when we experience it, but describing and explaining it is a more difficult task. In our everyday life we usually take quality for granted, especially when it is regularly provided. Yet we are all too acutely aware when it is lacking. We often only recognize the importance of quality when we experience the frustration and time wasting associated with its absence. Of one thing we can be certain: quality is what makes the difference between things being excellent or run-of-the-mill. Increasingly, quality makes the difference between success and failure.

The best organizations, whether public or private, understand quality and know its secret. Seeking the source of quality is an important quest. Education is also recognizing the need to pursue it, and to deliver it to pupils and students. There are plenty of candidates for the source of quality in education. Amongst these are:

outstanding teachers;

high moral values;

excellent examination results;

the support of parents, business and the local community;

plentiful resources;

the application of the latest technology;

strong and purposeful leadership;

the care and concern for pupils and students;

a well-balanced and challenging curriculum.

It is instructive to look to the business world for an insight into quality. IBM’s definition puts it simply: ‘quality equals customer satisfaction’ (Unterberger, 1991). Alex Trotman, an Executive Vice-President of the Ford Motor Company, has delivered the same message: ‘we know these days, in these tough times, that we have to satisfy our customers completely’. It is not quite as simple as ‘listen and respond to your customers and all the other good things will follow’, but it is a serious start. Organizations who take quality seriously know that much of the secret of quality stems from listening to and responding sympathetically to the needs and wants of their customers and clients. Quality involves doing many other things well, but unless an institution puts its customers first the preconditions for developing quality will not exist.

Why quality?

Quality is an idea whose time has come. It is on everyone’s lips. In the UK we have the Citizen’s Charter, the Business Excellence Model and the Investors in People standard, while the United States has the Malcolm Baldrige Award and the Japanese have the Deming Prize. The European Foundation for Quality Management has developed the successful European Quality Award, while internationally there is the important International Standard ISO9000 series. These are just some of the more influential quality awards and standards that have been introduced in recent years to promote quality and excellence in a wide range of industries and services. This new consciousness of quality has now reached education; educational institutions are being required to develop their own approaches to quality, and need to demonstrate publicly that they too can deliver a consistent quality service.

No longer are quality, quality assurance, total quality and TQM new initiatives or another set of fads designed to add to the workload of already over-worked teachers and under-funded institutions. While initiative fatigue has been a symptom of a hard-pressed education system for the past decade, quality improvement should not be seen in this light, but rather as a set of tools to help teachers and educational managers.

Total Quality Management is both a philosophy and a methodology. It can assist institutions to manage change and to set their own agendas for dealing with the plethora of new external pressures. Considerable claims are made for TQM. There are those in education who believe that TQM properly applied to it can complete a similar transformation. However, TQM does not and will not bring results overnight; neither is it a panacea for all the problems that beset education. Rather it is an important set of tools that can be employed in the management of educational institutions.

The four quality imperatives

When I first started researching quality I asked the question ‘why should an educational establishment want to be involved in quality assurance activities?’ My research has led me to the conclusion that educational institutions are pursuing quality improvement for a number of important reasons. Some are linked with professional responsibility, while others result from the competition inherent in educational marketplaces or from the need to demonstrate accountability.

I have called the results of this research the four quality imperatives. In the commercial world it is the survival imperative that often drives quality improvement, but the complexity of education and the importance of values in education makes the motives for taking a quality stance more complicated and diverse. The four imperatives reflect the complex environment in which educational institutions operate. They are the drivers and motivating forces that challenge any institution to take a proactive stance on quality.

The moral imperative

The customers and clients of the education service (students, parents and the community) deserve the best possible quality of education. This is the moral high ground in education and one of the few areas of educational discussion where there is little dissent. It is the duty of educational professionals and administrators to have an overriding concern to provide the very best possible educational opportunities. As John West-Burnham has put it, ‘it is difficult to conceptualize a situation where anything less than total quality is perceived as being appropriate or acceptable for the education of children’.

The professional imperative

Closely linked to the moral imperative is the professional imperative. Professionalism implies a commitment to the needs of students and an obligation to meet their needs by employing the most appropriate pedagogic practices. Educators have a professional duty to improve the quality of education and this, of course, places a considerable burden on teachers and administrators to ensure that both classroom practice and the management of the institution are operating to the highest possible standards.

The competitive imperative

Competition is a reality in the world of education. Falling enrolments can lead to staff redundancies and ultimately the viability of the institution can be under threat. Educationalists can meet the challenge of competition by working to improve the quality of their service and of their curriculum delivery mechanisms. The importance of TQM to survival is that it is a customer-driven process, focusing on the needs of clients and providing mechanisms to respond to their needs and wants. Competition requires strategies that clearly differentiate institutions from their competitors. Quality may sometimes be the only differentiating factor for an institution. Focusing on the needs of the customer, which is at the heart of quality, is one of the most effective means of facing the competition and surviving.

The accountability imperative

Schools and colleges are part of their communities and as such they must meet the political demands for education to be more accountable and publicly demonstrate the high standards. TQM supports the accountability imperative by promoting objective and measurable outcomes of the educational process and provides mechanisms for quality improvement. Quality improvement becomes increasingly important as institutions achieve greater control over their own affairs. Greater freedom has to be matched by greater accountability. Institutions have to demonstrate that they are able to deliver what is required of them.

Failure to meet even one of these imperatives can jeopardize institutional well-being and survival. If institutions fail to provide the best services they risk losing students who will opt for one of their competitors. By regarding these drivers as anything less than imperatives we risk the integrity of our profession and the future of our institutions. We are in an era where parents and politicians are asking tough and uncompromising questions. For education as for industry, quality improvement is no longer an option, it is a necessity.

The origins of the quality movement

To investigate how the quality movement started, we need to understand its origins in industry. It is from industry that the language, concepts and the methodology of TQM are derived.

There has always been a need to ensure that products conform to their specification and give customer satisfaction and value for money. Achieving consistent quality allows consumers to have confidence in a product and its producers. The marks of gold- and silversmiths are evidence of this long-standing concern.

Quality assurance became an issue with the advent of industrialization. Prior to this craftsmen set and maintained their own standards, on which their reputations and livelihoods depended. They established guilds that regulated quality and developed apprenticeship programmes that ensured that there was proper training and regulation in the craft. The advent of mass-production changed the emphasis completely. No longer were individuals responsible for making whole products. Instead the manufacturing process broke down work into narrow and repetitive tasks. Importantly for our discussion, it took away from the worker the possibility of self-checking quality.

One essential feature of a craft, the responsibility of the worker for the quality of the product, was lost when goods were mass-produced. New production methods, associated with the scientific approach to management and the name of F W Taylor, at the turn of the twentieth century, reduced many in the workforce to human components in the process of manufacture. A strict division of labour developed from it and necessitated the expansion of a system of detailed inspection known as quality control.

Quality control and inspection are processes that ensure that only products that meet a pre-determined specification leave the factory gate. However, quality control is an after-the-event process. It is divorced from the people who produce the product. Inspection and quality control are designed to detect defective products. They are necessary processes under mass production, but they are often wasteful and expensive, involving considerable amounts of scrap and reworking.

Quality control and inspection in the past 20 years have increasingly been seen as uneconomic and wasteful, as they do not assure that the workforce care about quality. Many companies are replacing or augmenting them with methods of quality assurance and quality improvement that seek to build quality into the production process by returning to workers their responsibility for quality.

Notions of quality improvement and quality assurance began to emerge after the Second World War. However, in Britain and the United States they only began to attract attention on a large scale in the 1980s as companies started to ask questions about why the Japanese were at the time capturing larger and larger shares of world markets in a wide range of manufactured products. Questions were asked about their success, and whether it is bound up with their national culture and their novel quality management techniques. To find the origin of this new quality movement we need to start the search in the United States in the late 1920s.

The contributions of Deming, Shewhart and Juran

Quality assurance and total quality came late to the West, although the ideas were originally developed in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States by, among others, W Edwards Deming. Deming was an American statistician with a PhD in physics. He was born in 1900 and died in 1993. His influence as a management theorist has only been of comparatively recent origin in the West, although the Japanese have been calling on his talents since 1950. He is probably the person who has done most to influence the quality movement.

Deming begun formulating his ideas in the 1930s while working on methods of removing variability and waste from industrial processes. He started work at Western Electric’s legendary Hawthorne plant in Chicago, where Joseph Juran, another pioneering quality theorist and the other main US contributor to the Japanese quality revolution, was also employed. The Hawthorne plant at the time employed over 40,000 people manufacturing telephone equipment. It was made famous by Elton Mayo and his colleagues from Harvard University, who between 1927 and 1932 carried out their famous series of experiments on the causes of productivity changes. It was whilst there that Mayo and his team discovered the famous Hawthorne effect. They demonstrated that the factors that contributed most to increased productivity were not changes in the physical conditions at work but the style of leadership and group cohesiveness. In so doing they discovered the importance to industrial o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• The author
• Preface
• 1 Basics
• 2 Quality
• 3 TQM
• 4 Gurus
• 5 Kiternarks
• 6 Organization
• 7 Leadership
• 8 Teamwork
• 9 Knowledge
• 10 Tools
• 11 Benchmarking
• 12 Measurement
• 13 Budgeting
• 14 Strategy
• 15 Framework
• 16 Self-assessment
• Bibliography
• Index