Total Quality Management in Education

Total Quality management (TQM) is a system that continuously improves the services and products offered to the clients. In the era where national economic systems have been replaced by technologies of transportation and communication, businesses that fail to practice TQM face a global challenge of non-relevancy in the present market.

The top benefits of TQM in educational sector

With TQM, businesses can stand shoulder to shoulder with the big guns in the market without hassles and so, the potentials of the system in our schools are crystal clear. The following are some top benefits of TQM in educational sector.

Let’s dive in:
1. TQM can easily help schools in providing better services to the students and the staff members.
2. With the continuous improvement of TQM system, it assists schools to fulfill the accountability requirements.
3. It offers more excitement and challenges to the students and teachers than a good enough learning environment can actually provide.

Essential elements of TQM in education
In a school where TQM is being used, there is always the need for constant improvement of services to the students. This is done by the improvement teams and individuals and there is one thing that is generally known in the type of system, the concept of being good enough is unapologetically considered inadequate.

Some of the essential elements of TQM in education include:

1. Awareness and Commitment
There is no other way the talents of students can be fully discovered and harnessed except through meaningful contribution of every stakeholders in the system. An excellent way to start off is through the staff meeting.

Such meeting will yield the following results:
• A dynamic overview of TQM elements and potentials by one or more presenters who are well grounded in both.
• A clear commitment from the stakeholders including the school board, superintendent and the principal that will fully support the implementation of TQM approach.

2. A Clear Mission
Though it is not easy to manage continuously movement toward progressively higher quality standards depends on defining those standards. One thing to note is, if a TQM steering committee is formed in a school, it should provide answer to the question of mission statement of the school and a functioning process for divisions and departments translating this statement into exit outcomes for graduates. These standards should be able to solve real life problems.

3. A Systems Planning Approach.
This another crucial approach many schools are not getting right at the moment. Traditional education has been compartmentalized excessively. For instance, if a teacher A is taking a student on English Language as a course and teacher B is taking that same student Biology. Many at times, teacher B will not be interested in the level of English competency through which the student writes his/her biology report.

This is a big problem that needs to be addressed. If higher levels of English competence are to be developed in our students, there must be higher levels of system-wide and cross-department palling for instructional improvement in our schools.

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