Total quality management (TQM) faces challenges in education due to: 1) rejection of industrial models and emphasis on individual students, 2) tradition of individual rather than collective responsibility for quality, and 3) belief that performance is determined by inputs rather than processes. TQM implementation in schools requires: 1) defining customers and empowering students, 2) conducting customer surveys to identify quality issues, and 3) setting ambitious goals to improve beyond traditional standards. Key procedures, classroom processes, and ongoing instructor evaluation are also important to apply TQM principles to education effectively.

1. TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT
AND
EDUCATION
Sofia Marisol Zelada

2. - LEARNING OBJECTIVES -
Identify the challenges in implementing
1 TQM in education centers and learn how to
deal with them.
Learn how to implement TQM in schools,
2 academies, universities?

3. - BACKGROUND -
o Crisis for Government-provided education.
o Reduction on educational investment.
o Ageing population.
o No willingness (“Dinkies and Woofies”) to pay
more taxes for education.

4. - THE RESPONSE -
o UK
• Control system and specification of the curriculum that must
be taught.
• Parental choice and open enrolment to schools were
legislated.
o USA
• 6 national educational goals for 2000.
• Emphasize cross-curricular competencies and
empowerment of participants.
o Canada
• Encouraging innovation so as to do more with less.
• Voluntary pay freezes for staff

5. - CHALLENGES -
Six categories of ‘Cultural’ Challenge
① The rejection of industrial models and vocabulary: an anti-management
tendency.
• Failure to recognize the benefits which derive from good systematic
management techniques.
• “concerned with the individual child and the whole person, and are
not be driven by the impersonal demands of economy.
② A tradition of individualist rather than collectivist responsibility
for quality.
• Quality was defined by the teacher in his or her
own classroom.
• i.e. entry grade of “D” vrs “C”.

6. ③ The organizational context of the school but not the classroom can be focus
for TQM.
• Classrooms have been viewed as islands of professional autonomy
with the process of teaching and learning.
• School is viewed as a collection of separate, highly specialized
individual performers and units.
③ Traditional belief that performance achievement is the product of inputs.
• key inputs: pupils competences, class size, amount of money available
for books.
• No relationship between school effectiveness and input factors.

7. ⑤ We are doing very well as we are under the present circumstances.
• There are no apparent grounds for dissatisfaction by their stakeholders.
• “if we do what we always do we will get what we always get and that has
been quite satisfactory for us!”
• “comfort zone”
⑥ A tradition of management by centralized decision-making: the ‘headmaster’
or ‘superintended tradition’.
• “Decision centralization”
• Principal’s job has been to plan for subordinates and to appraise their
work to ensure that plans are followed.

8. - SUMMARY -
Abstract definition of ‘Quality’ and to avoid the
conceptualization of quality as customers’
perception.
Tardiness to accept fully the notion of internal
customer-supplier chains, and to explore the
perceived quality of these.
Absence of systematic evaluation in general, and in
particular of internal products, either by the
immediate customer or by the preceding supplier.
Absence of a defined strategy for its local
‘marketplace’.

9. -APPLICATION OF TQM IN EDUCATION-
Step by Step
1. Defining customers, customer-supplier
chains and empowering student.
North Area College, England.
• Teacher is supplier to student and vice versa.
• Mutual commitment to quality.
• More emphasis on self study.
• Mutual partnership between students and
staff.

10. 2. Costumer audits and surveys: matching costumer
and supplier perspectives.
Lakeside, Wales UK
• Identifying quality issues and assessing the
viability of TQM for the school.
• Surveys to trap the opinion of the customers
about process practices and school context in
general.
• Differences between the providers view of the
same experience and the users view of the
same experience.

11. 3. Hoshin or outrageous goals
• Public sector institutions are being to
achieve beyond its comfort zone
• Wayzata, Minnesota USA: “all students will achive the
performance standards for each grade of schooling, if they do
not, the school system will provide support and training until
they do”.
• Fort McMurray, Alberta: “100% competitions in grades 11 and
12 – no drop outs”.

12. 4. Defining key whole-school procedures, process
mapping and measurement.
• Introduce the concept of TQM to senior
staff and progressively to all teaching
and non teaching staff.
• Data collection facilitates planning and
scheduling.
• Determine the key procedures to be
defined.

13. 5. Deriving customer data on classroom processes
US Army School of Engineering and
Logistics.
• Ongoing instructor improvement
programme.
• Good instruction using input from all
engineering students.
• Teaching methods.

14. - CONCLUSION-
• Institutions must be more and more financially self-managing,
judged and funded on criteria of performance.
• Need to redefine their clients as customers.
• TQM is empowering and democratizing and so fits well with the
ethos of the educational world, with its traditional focus on the
person having both entitlement and unique learning needs.

15. Thank you!