ABSTRACT
The quality movement owes its origins to the work of Deming who in the late 1940s was concerned with controlling the quality of manufactured goods by statistical sampling at all stages of the production process. The ideas that were developed in manufacturing soon spread to the service sector where it was helpful to think in production terms about the mechanisms that were underlying the delivery of a service. The classical managerial problem with all services is that the recipient or consumer of the service is an integral part of the delivery of that service; there is no service without customers. Education can be seen as a service industry or to embody many of the attributes of a service industry. Quality is a word that conveys a range of meanings in its literary use and some of this complexity has strayed into the domain of quality management.
