FROM QUALITY MANAGEMENT TO MANAGING QUALITY: SYSTEMIC APPROACH
Journal Title: Problems of Education in the 21st Century - Year 2009, Vol 12, Issue 5
Abstract
There have been more and more discussions going on in recent years about the quality of service provided in different level and different type of educational institutions. It is not one educational institution that characterizes quality as the most important priority of the activity. However, one thing is to characterize and declare and another is to actually strive for this quality. In other words, the priorities of educational institutions can be quite different however, it is inevitably obligatory to try to survive in the market. Quality system is one of the mechanisms helping the institution to organize and fulfill the activity so that to ensure its effective work under competitive conditions. Moreover, no institution should wait for its prestige to start diminishing on the contrary it has to do its best to guarantee successful functioning in the future. Thus, the head of every educational institution today has to care about how effectively its institution functions, what are possible ways and methods of its activity improvement. It is not enough to have practical experience and intuition to do this. Theoretical knowledge is necessary here. It is worth mentioning such a relatively new science field as Qualitology; (квалитология-Russian) which by its nature is triple. The essential parts of it are: quality theory, quality evaluation theory (kvalimetrija) and quality management theory. On the other hand, the analysis of quality management problems is impossible without systemology, management, innovation and theoretical and practical achievements in other spheres. Eventually, the most major are international quality standards ISO 9000:2000. Everything is joined here into a closely related system. Several aspects of education quality having been discussed obviously tell us about the importance of systemic attitude. Every educational institution, first of all, has to be able to solve problems itself, look for ways out from certain situations. And this is much more complicated than in business world. In business sphere a defective product made is simply eliminated from the system and doesn’t get to (shouldn’t get to) consumer. In education sphere it is more complicated. It is very difficult to eliminate damage, it is almost impossible. The more, that the emphasis is transferred from external quality control system into internal in other words, institution has to be able to coordinate occurring quality management questions by inner efforts. In general, it can be asserted that any attempt to improve quality means that quality system exists no matter that it is not certified. It is very difficult to implement quality management systems in educational institutions. As it is known, education systems are rather conservative and tend to resist the implementing of innovations. Most frequently they have “we know everything” attitude. Quality management system means, first of all, that processes which are carried out in certain educational institution are managed and forecasted. I would think that duty of any head of educational institution is to seek that quality conception would become a need and virtue of every institution employee. This is a constant work. Constant efforts are necessary for this. Quality management is not a single action. This is a systemic task for the implementation of which a long term, methodical and systematic work is necessary not only for achievement of a certain quality level but for its maintenance and constant improvement.
Authors and Affiliations
Vincentas Lamanauskas
Keywords
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