Leadership and Management of Quality in Higher Education

Chenicheri Sid Nair, Len Webster, Patricie Mertova, Chenicheri Sid Nair, Len Webster, Patricie Mertova

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781780630373
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book provides a range of case studies concerning the leadership and management of quality development in higher education. It captures the experiences of senior administrators and managers to the complexity of problems that quality development involves. The authors draw attention to the human-centred approach to quality, as they argue that in any activity there is a need to take account of human values and attitudes.

• Experiences from experts in the field
• Guide to resources that are utilized in the higher education industry
• Auditors' perceptions

Part 1

Overview

1

Growth of the quality movement in higher education

Patricie Mertova, Len Webster and Sid Nair

Abstract:

This chapter aims to provide background to quality in higher education in order to situate the subsequent chapters in a particular context. The chapter describes the development of the quality movement, including its origins and how it was introduced into higher education. It outlines the understandings of the notion of quality in higher education and gives an overview of critique of quality in the higher education context.

Key words

development of the quality movement

higher education

quality enhancement

quality assurance

Introduction

The subject of quality has been a global issue in higher education for nearly two decades, during which time quality has developed from a marginal to a central concern. The greater focus on quality in higher education has resulted from a range of competing factors, the most prominent being: political control over higher education, growth in the number and changes in the expectations of students, and financial control on the part of national governments. Quality monitoring has become a mechanism for governments worldwide to tackle these competing factors. At the same time, it can be argued that it has been frequently employed to disguise the dominant focus on accountability, rather than enhancement, in higher education (Barnett, 1992; Harvey and Green, 1993; Morley, 1997; Lomas, 2000; Harvey, 2004, 2005).

It can be further argued that the significant changes in approaches to quality in higher education have been management-driven, underpinned by a desire to develop a range of mechanisms of control (Lomas, 2000; Jones, 2003). However, human-centred aspects, which play a crucial role in higher education, have been largely missing in quality mechanisms. Furthermore, the management-driven mechanisms and systems have frequently been found unsuitable or only partly suitable for the higher education sector, due to their disregard for the nature of higher education and its employees, in particular the academics (Birnbaum, 2000; Green, 1994). In response, this book focuses on the human-centred aspects and related issues regarding higher education quality. The book represents the international perspectives of a number of higher education leaders, managers and auditors, including academics and academic developers.

Where did quality come from?

Quality control as a practice has been around in some form since at least the Middle Ages, when individual guilds took up the responsibility for overseeing the quality of products. More formal quality control, focused on inspection, measurement and testing, came to the fore of professional practice only at the beginning of the twentieth century, accompanying the increase in mass production. Systematic quality management originated in the manufacturing sector in the 1900s with a rapid growth of standardisation. Until 1915, Great Britain was the only country in the world with some type of national standardisation, and then the number of standardisation organisations throughout the world increased dramatically, particularly between 1916 and 1932. The United States joined the movement around 1917 (Voehl, 1994).

After the Second World War, Japan became the main driver of the efficiency/quality movement. In 1946, US General MacArthur was assigned to oversee the re-building of Japan, particularly through creating quality control tools and techniques to improve efficiency of Japanese industries. General MacArthur invited W. E. Deming and J. M. Juran, two key individuals involved in the development of modern quality concepts in the USA at that time, to lead the quality drive. Deming and Juran promoted collaborative quality concepts to Japanese businesses, and within twenty years, quality became a worldwide movement. Beginning with Deming and Juran in the late 1940s/early 1950s, the movement was eventually reinvigorated in the United States by Feigenbaum in the 1960s. Feigenbaum introduced and coined the concept of Total Quality Control (TQC).

In the 1980s, Britain took the lead in the quality movement with the introduction of BS 5750 as an international quality standard. Britain first introduced it as a quality standard for the European Commission, and later it was accepted as an international standard known as ISO 9000 (Voehl, 1994).

The concept of quality has undergone a number of changes in focus. Quality control dominated manufacturing and engineering from the 1940s to the 1980s. The 1990s saw the emergence of quality as a profession with a focus on quality systems when, not only in Britain but also in many other Western European countries, quality spread from industry and business into the public sector, including healthcare and higher education (Westerheijden et al., 1994; Woodhouse, 2004).

Quality development in higher education

The origins of accreditation systems as a form of quality assurance in US higher education date back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Woodhouse, 2004). The British system of external examiners assuring standards in universities can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century (DETYA, 2000). Another form of official quality assurance was introduced into a part of the British higher education sector (the former polytechnics) in the mid-1960s. However, external quality assurance, as ‘a world-wide phenomenon’, began only in the 1980s and grew rapidly in the 1990s (Woodhouse, 2004).

Higher education systems of the former Soviet satellite countries in Central and Eastern Europe (such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and others) were virtually unaffected by the quality phenomenon in Western Europe in the 1980s. This was due to the Communist rule in these countries. Quality of higher education was claimed by the individual Communist states, however it was rarely examined. Quality monitoring in the form of state-controlled accreditation was introduced shortly after the fall of the Communist regimes when the Czech Republic became the first to establish a higher education accreditation agency in 1990. This was largely an attempt of the newly established state to hold some form of control over higher education institutions which had gained extensive academic freedom. The approaches in other post-Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe were similar (CHES, 2001; Van der Wende and Westerheijden, 2003).

In the 1990s, a range of quality management systems was introduced into Western European higher education from the business sector. Western European higher education institutions, particularly in Britain, started adopting these quality management systems in the hope of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the higher education sector (Lomas, 2000).

Management systems were first introduced into higher education in the USA in the early 1960s (Birnbaum, 2000). Birnbaum argued that management systems (‘management fads’) were usually introduced first into the business or government sectors and were subsequently adapted by higher education. Common to such systems was their fairly quick succession: attention to one approach was generally soon replaced by another. The Planning Programming Budgeting System (PPBS) was one of the first management systems initially introduced to the US Defense Department which then migrated into the higher education sector. Recent similar examples include Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Benchmarking (Birnbaum, 2000).

Benchmarking and Total Quality Management (TQM)/Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) belong to the better known management techniques adopted within the context of higher education (Birnbaum, 2000).

Benchmarking was introduced to US higher education in the 1980s. It required ‘an institution to study the processes of others and then use these understandings to set future goals or benchmarks for itself’ (Birnbaum, 2000, p. 81). Performance indicators form a part of the process of benchmarking. Birnbaum pointed out that, as it proved difficult to measure productivity in the service sector in general (and in higher education in particular), the most problematic aspect of benchmarking and performance indicators has been that they were, to a large extent, based on the assumption that only what is measurable is worthwhile.

TQM was introduced by Deming, who developed statistical co...