ABSTRACT

There is nothing unusual about educationists having concerns for quality. This has been going on for a long time-certainly since Plato’s training programme for the Guardians in The Republic (vii). However, since the White Paper, Education and Training for the Twenty-first Century of 1991 there has been a massive burgeoning of interest in what some cynics these days refer to as the ‘quality business’. We now have a plethora of custodians of quality, all of whom are at least to some extent legitimated by the Education Reform Act of 1988, the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 as well as the White Paper with its concerns for quality and accountability. The latter, particularly, not only referred to levels of quality assurance: quality control, validation and examination, and external assessment, but also specifically mentioned quality systems-BS 5750 and Total Quality Management (TQM), of which more later.