Quality in Education
This report is from our 2018 archive. See what the Foundation does now.
Translated from Arabic. Read the original.
Quality in education
The concept of quality in education
Quality began in industry, so its concepts have to be adapted to fit the educational process. In education it may be defined as follows:
In education, quality means translating students' needs and expectations into defined characteristics that become the basis for standardising the educational service and delivering it to students in line with what they expect.
The term quality means freedom from defects, or customer satisfaction. In education it therefore rests on several important pillars, among them:
- Customer satisfaction: the learner, the parent, the community
- Continuous improvement
Continuous improvement is one of the foundations of quality management. It consists of unceasing efforts to improve performance: efforts directed at improving the inputs and the processes that convert inputs into outputs. It therefore covers the performance of staff, buildings, equipment and working methods, and it is carried out through work teams. The beneficiary (the student) receives the outputs of the process, and for good outputs to reach him, everything that precedes them must itself be of good quality.
If we define quality as doing the right thing the first time and every time, with no room for error, then that is the educational understanding of quality, since improving teaching performance, or performance within the educational process, does not admit trial and error.
Archive photograph showing Mervat Fayed, the mother of quality; Mansour Shaaban, former quality coordinator at the Ministry; and the fine young man Mohamed Hamdy Fares, one of the champions of quality at El-Fath Primary School in El-Delgamon
From the archive of the Innovators and Inventors project