Deployment of some degree of Quality Management System (QMS) is a common phenomenon in the business world, however it is still a discovery in the educational institutions including schools. Like any small or large business, running a school is an intricate stuff and they also are under increasing pressure to continuously add value to their stakeholders and build a brand for the future. Hence continuous improvements and focus on processes and procedures becomes critical even for them.
Therefore, the following become critical:
- Helping schools establish and understand the significance of a system of quality management and
- Supporting them in adopting an easy-to-implement framework with few implementation guidelines which could help them to embrace this new thought seamlessly
An in-depth research for this was carried out with 30 plus private schools in India and the participants included principals, HODs and teachers. The responses from these participants made it evident that, there are many aspects of their regular operations like lesson planning, teacher development, classroom effectiveness and many more that essentially requires quality focused thought and action and necessitates some action in these areas.
Also, few key themes that had emerged during these conversations indicate that solutions for few long pending elements are required and these include implementation of holistic education in true sense, impact of tying up academia with extra-curricular activities and the methods of teacher training that could foster teaching with values.
As there is lot of room for improvement, having a structured approach that entails envisaging, implementing and measuring quality as per certain guidelines/standard becomes necessary. Hence a simple deployment framework consisting of four key steps is being recommended.
The four steps are:
- Listing all the critical processes at schools and documenting them, making it available to all the concerned at the school
- Carrying out short/concise assessments at defined intervals to gauge what is going well and why? what is not going well and why?
- Addressing the areas of improvements to plug the gaps
- Use of appropriate quality tools to enhance the chances of strong QMS deployment
The above steps could bear some similarities with one or two of the ISO standards as it is a proven method for gradual progression and schools need not be an exception to this.
ISO or any other certification is not being recommended as mandatory, however a few good practices of the standard could be adopted and continued to see the desired shift in the results.
As a final word, Education is a powerful tool to break the barriers of inequalities and the cycle of poverty, hence giving a boost to Quality in all aspects of school operations and maintaining focus of continuous improvements to attain excellence should become the underlying objective of any educational institution.