CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1. Introduction

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 persons 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 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:
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.
Quality is an idea whose time has come. It is on everyones lips. In the UK we
have the Citizens 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

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.

1.2 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 Electrics 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 between1927 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 output and productivity of social
psychology,

group

norms

and

values,

leadership

and

the

informal

organization structures.
After working at Western Electric, Deming moved to the US Department of
Agriculture. Whilst there he was introduced to a person who would influence
his thinking and introduce him to a number of ideas that were crucial for the
development of the quality movement. Walter Shewhart was a statistician
who worked at the Bell Laboratories in New York. He had developed
techniques to bring industrial processes into what he called statistical
control. These were a series of techniques for removing the sources of
variability from industrial processes, so enabling them to be made more
predictable and controllable. Shewharts aim was to use statistical control to
eliminate waste and delay. One of Shewharts lasting contributions, which
was developed by Deming, was his plan, do, check, act (PDCA) cycle that
offered the first method for managing continuous quality improvement.

Demings initial contribution was to develop and advance Shewharts

methods. The statistical methods of Shewhart and Deming are now known as
Statistical Process Control (SPC). Taken together, the combined insights of

the human relations movement associated with Mayo and his colleagues and
SPC are the theoretical underpinnings of TQM.
The quality movement had its first success following World War II, but not in
the United States which had pioneered many of the techniques. It was in warravaged Japan that the quality movement emerged. Deming first visited
Japan in the late 1940s to work on their post-war census. Impressed by his
work, the Japanese Union of Engineers and Scientists invited him to return in
1950 to lecture to leading Japanese industrialists on the application of
Statistical Process Control. The Japanese were concerned to reconstruct their
war-torn industry. US bombing had largely destroyed Japanese industry, and
what was left mainly produced poor-quality imitations of other nations
products. The Japanese wanted to learn the new industrial techniques,
particularly the quality control lessons, from other industrialized nations

1.3 The educational product

It is always necessary to ask two fundamental questions when trying to
understand quality in any situation. The first is What is product? The second
is Who are the customers? These questions are equally applicable to the
discussion of quality in education. The product of education is an area of
difficulty. There are a number of different candidates for it. The pupil or the
student is often spoken about as if they fulfil that role. In education we often
talk as though learners are the output, especially with reference to the
institutions perceived performance over discipline and behavior. Terms like
the supply of graduates make education sound like a production line with
students emerging from the end of it. The problem with this definition is that
it is difficult to square it with much educational practice. For a product to be
the subject of a quality assurance process the producer needs firstly to
specify and control the source of supply.

Total Quality Management has become a key management tool and is a philosophy of
management and leadership that is currently driving todays industry. TQM has been Successful
applied in multinational firms/organizations; institutions of higher learning began To reexamine
the educational process and the use of TQM principles in administrative areas of
Academia.
TQM in the classroom has been successful. The old role of teacher as lecturer and Provider of
knowledge has been replaced with a new role: teacher as facilitator, mentor and Classroom
manager. The goal is no longer to impart knowledge to students: teachers and Students must
design and deliver education together. If the students are active participants in The classroom. It
is more likely that they will process the necessary knowledge and Motivation to become life-long
learners. To successfully apply TQM to education the Systematic nature and various components
of education must be stated. Some of these
Components include:
a. Understanding the role of managers, leaders and facilitators (faculty)
b. Creating a learning organization
c. Understanding customers and meeting or exceeding their needs.
d. Being clear on purpose and on product/service definition
e. Building partnerships with customers and suppliers
f. Knowing the quality that is used in designed and built-in, not inspected in at the end.
g. Working with and through teams
h. Focusing on understanding and improving the process.
i. Performing continuous improvement
j. Benchmarking
k. Marking decisions based on data.

1.4 Characteristics of educational institutions which have introduced the

principles of TQM
Educational institutions exist as long as they are useful. They and their social environment are
continually developing: they all have a "life" cycle consisting of four main stages: foundationformation, growth-expansion, maturity and the last stage, which can lead either to decline or

revival. The decline in the life cycle of educational institutions can be avoided provided that the
process of periodic revitalization is carried out permanently.
The characteristics of traditional educational institutions are distinctly different from those that
have introduced the principles of TQM.
The differences between an university organized according to the principles of TQM and an
ordinary one consists in:
Optimization of the activity of faculties. Each faculty, starting with deanships, professorships
and secretary ships must work taking into account well-defined standards of quality, respectively
written procedures to help them organize the whole activity;
Vertical alignment. Each person must understand the policy of the university in the domain of
quality and its mission;
Horizontal alignment. There must not be competition between different faculties, all from the
same university. There should be certain functional mechanism to solve efficiently any problem,
especially if the system of quality management is implemented:
A single command for all activities. Key-procedures for all syllabuses or administrative
programs must be organized so that all processes should be controlled by just one series of
commands; the elaboration of the Procedures must be done starting from the question: who is the
customer of each process.
In education, TQM has a significant role in empowering the teaching staff to improve what the
student learn and the way they learn.
The need for quality in higher education is experienced by everyone involved in it, it is a national
and international alarm signal. The creation of a culture of quality is an essential condition for
implementing the principles of TQM in an university. The managerial staff is responsible for
creating such culture so as to obtain performance in the quality of educational services;
performance can rest above similar service offered by competition. In the education field the
process of teaching/learning must be regarded as the essential mission of the institution, one that
has to be continually improved. The decisive role is played both by professors and parents,
administration, scientific researchers in the domain of education and social sciences.
In education results are seen in the future, this is why a long-term perspective is required, which
supposes a clear identification of objectives and their communication to all the employees. The

fundamental philosophy of management in education and of teaching must remain the same over
a long period of time, irrespective of trends and of changes taking place in the social
environment .At present we can see how classically-furnished schools are changing into modern
ones, TQM in education supposes a holistic approach out of which each of the following seven
elements should not be missing: philosophy, vision, strategy, aptitudes, resources, rewards and
organization. Each element has a function that must not be omitted.