ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 introduced the concept of quality and this chapter will examine the relationship between quality, accountability, and leadership in terms of the responsibilities of leaders in educational organizations. There is nothing new about the notion of accountability in education. National inspectors were appointed from the early part of the nineteenth century, and external inspection of schools was an accepted part of education. At the same time, in the UK, North America and Europe, many technical institutes were founded which were accountable to the rapidly developing networks of local government and universities, or their precursor organizations. These technical institutes embodied a strong commitment to internal systems of quality, based on scholarship. As we shall see in this chapter this pattern was operant for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In more recent times new accountability systems have been developed which have both acknowledged the autonomy of educational institutions and, at the same time, accented their accountability to central government. It is only in the most recent of times that a balance has been struck which enables educational institutions to operate sophisticated internal review processes while at the same time being subject to external inspection.
