Internal quality assurance programme for public schools in North West Province

Abstract

In South Africa little is documented on strategies for assuring and promoting quality in schools. The quality of education in South Africa is presently under increased scrutiny by both professionals and politicians. Schools have been called to account in ways, which were never heard of, in earlier decades. Departments of Education in different provinces are more concerned about ways of assuring and improving quality in schools. In this regard Quality Assurance as part of quality management, is a process which has great potential for enhancing accountability in public schooling. It also has principles that originated from TQM which suggest that every process within the organisation contributes to the overall quality in that organisation. The purpose of this study was to determine the practices and principles of quality assurance and the kind of knowledge and skills needed by principals and educators in order to effectively manage, assure and improve quality. The study also examined existing quality models in both industry and education with the ultimate aim of developing quality assurance programme for public schools in North West Province. There are some important historical points that provide a background to the concept of quality management and demonstrate why definitions of quality vary contextually. The movement of quality has been strongly influenced by the ideas of founding fathers such as Deming, Juran, Crosby, Ishikawa, Kano and Imai. The evolution of quality concept is closely related to the different eras of the modern quality movement described in terms of four quality eras namely, inspection era, quality control era, quality assurance era and Total Quality Management era. The quality assurance era came with a change away from product quality towards systems of quality and it includes quality control approaches while total quality management refers to a systematic management of organisations' customer-supplier relationships that ensures steep-slope improvements in quality performance. Although they concentrated on quality in manufacturing industry, their principles of quality management and quality improvements are applicable to education. There have been attempts to adapt TQM to educational management in a limited number of schools worldwide. Schools are expected to manage and improve quality of teaching and learning. In order to accomplish this, Quality Assurance practices offers mechanisms such as policies, attitudes, actions and procedures necessary to ensure that quality of education is been maintained and enhanced. It requires actions internal to the organization as well as actions of external bodies. Although quality assurance framework for South Africa is still in its infancy stage, policies are in place to monitor and evaluate performance in schools. For several years South Africa was without any national system for evaluating the performance of schools. The policy on Whole School Evaluation (WSE) is the Department's initiative to evaluate and monitor quality in schools. The evaluation will be based on indicators covering inputs, processes and outputs, and school self-evaluation, which form the basis for external evaluation and also for improvement .. It is on the basis of this external evaluation, that an internal quality assurance programme was developed in this study. The subjects of the study were 500 educators out of which 396 respondents were analysed. The empirical investigation conducted revealed that schools should be ready to innovate any change that lead to the improvement of the teaching and learning process. Furthermore, for educators to be able to assure and manage quality, they should have positive attitude, thorough knowledge and understanding of quality practices and have good communication and interactive skills to be able to deal with changes in schools. The study also revealed that for managers to assess quality progress they need, policies and procedures, School Development Plan (SDP), sound relation with parents and learners. Good practices for assuring and improving quality in schools include planning, involvement and commitment of all stakeholders. Quality assurance programme for public schools in North West Province was developed on the basis of the identified practices of quality from the literature and the empirical study. The study recommends that the programme be used by public schools so that they are able to take stock of the quality of activities in their schools and ultimately seek a way of continuously improving these activities.