Editorial

Citation

Dalrymple, J. (2011), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.2011.12019baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Quality Assurance in Education, Volume 19, Issue 2

Increasing mobility of people has resulted in a need to have systems of harmonisation of educational provision and recognition of educational attainment. Many countries have recently engaged in the development of policies and approaches to internationalising the curriculum and the student experience. In other jurisdictions, international students are seen as an important element in the income mix of institutions that are experiencing a reducing unit of resource from traditional funding sources. In some jurisdictions, the income from international students makes a significant contribution to the foreign exchange earnings of the country and the export of educational experiences that occurs through international students is among the top “export earners” for the country.

As these developments have progressed, there have been parallel developments in attention to quality assurance, quality improvement and quality enhancement in the field of education provision. These developments at the international level have also been reflected in increased interest and participation in the proceedings of this journal by an increasingly diverse international community. The importance of early childhood education for primary, secondary and tertiary education has been increasingly recognised. The primacy of the staff and human resource contribution to education provision has been increasingly recognised and that has been one key element in the appreciation of the systemic nature of the person and their interactions with the wider educational environment. The current papers are drawn from a truly international selection with each one reporting on activities in a different jurisdiction, with different aspects of the contribution to improving quality in education being featured.

The first paper, by Zelealem T. Temtime and Rebana N. Mmereki, looks at the provision of postgraduate business education in the developing economy of Botswana. The authors are concerned with the perceptions of the graduates of postgraduate programs in Botswana in terms of the satisfaction of students with their chosen program and the relevance of the curriculum to a developing economy in the African context. The authors conclude that there needs to be constant review of the recruitment and selection of both staff and students, teaching and learning processes and liaison between business schools and their industry partners and advisors to ensure that standards, curriculum and the student experience all lay the foundation for the professional managers of the future to engage with lifelong learning.

In the second paper, by Nga D. Tran, Thanh T. Nguyen and My T.N. Nguyen, the authors discuss education provision in the context of another developing economy, namely Vietnam. In this case, the paper addresses the policy response of the government that results in a standard for quality in higher education institutions. The authors conclude that the anticipated radical changes to higher education are unlikely to result in significant movement towards a student-centred approach to teaching and learning. The paper focuses on the decision-making processes that resulted in the standard and the authors offer their analysis in order that other jurisdictions may learn from the Vietnam experience.

An European dimension is brought to the deliberations in this issue by Jan Kleijnen, Diana Dolmans, Jos Willems and Hans van Hout in their paper that examines the extent to which internal quality management contributes more to control than to improvement in education provision. The authors conclude that staffs view the improvement aspects of quality management positively, while there was negativity towards the control aspects. The authors also noted significant variety in the strength of the quality culture in different departments across institutions.

Boran Toker is the author of the penultimate paper and this paper examines the job satisfaction among academic staff in Turkey. It is part of the thinking in the wider quality movement that, in service delivery organisations particularly, job satisfaction is a contributor to improved service quality. The author found a moderately high level of job satisfaction among academic staff, but that the overall measures masked important detail in the individual job satisfaction measures that included stratification in satisfaction with, for example, seniority of staff and their length of service.

The final paper in this issue, by Alison Lai Fong Cheng and Hon Keung Yau reports on the perceptions held by Hong Kong primary school principals and teachers about quality management in their schools. The elements of quality management used included “values and duties”, “systems and teams”, “resources and changes” and “meeting pupil needs and empowering staff”. There were found to be differences in perception of the extent to which these elements of quality management had been implemented in the respondents’ primary schools and there was also a difference in perceptions between principals and teachers on the extent of implementation of some of the quality elements.

The papers in this issue span the deployment of quality management in primary schools through to tertiary education and cover education in developing economies and developed economies. The geographical spread is also significant and we hope that these papers will provide food for thought for all readers of the journal.

John Dalrymple