Quality Improvement in Action

Education professionals have always claimed to pay attention to quality. Monitoring quality and policing the work of the membership is inherent in the definition of 'professional' yet is exercised only in medicine and the law, even then rather dubiously. The British Standard for quality management, BS 5750, and its international parallel, ISO 9000 are the standard. The rather liberal developments in self-evaluation and action research that took place in schools years ago under the Schools Council and latterly independently or with LEA guidance were never going to win public confidence because of the professional introversion they exuded. The manual, standardizing procedures, the notions of non-compliances, non-conforming products and corrective action are very helpful. The way forward to Total Quality Management, should it be chosen by the college, seems pretty straightforward from the four principles of The Investors in People—commitment, planning, action and evaluation. The realism of the paymasters, in the accountability-oriented quality assurance systems they produce, is undeniable.