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For many in Education, quality has become a term that is identified with bureaucratic procedures or institutional practices for monitoring the effectiveness of organisational systems. There are many books that describe these quality management systems and define different quality control mechanisms such as quality assurance, quality audit and quality assessment (Doherty, 1994; Parsons, 1994). Other books emphasise the importance of measuring quality and concern themselves with indicators of quality (Riley and Nuttall, 1994). Some of these books put forward ideas that have their origin in industrial settings. For example a popular view of quality which has an industrial origin is the idea of total quality management (Collard, 1989) which has been applied to schools (Murgatroyd and Morgan, 1993; Greenwood and Gaunt, 1994) and higher education institutions (Lewis and Smith, 1994). Murgatroyd and Morgan described a quality revolution in which the right to define quality has moved from the experts to the customers. They suggest that we should view schools and colleges as inverted pyramids in which parents and pupils, as the customers, should be put at the top, teachers at the chalk face would go next, and the senior managers would come at the bottom, with the headteacher in the position of the inverted apex. This sounds great until one reads between the lines of statements such as ‘this book is not intended to discuss the ideology of schooling, but to sensitise and help those now leading primary and secondary schools to understand and respond to new contexts that governments have legislated’ (Murgatroyd and Morgan, 1993:2). In other words, such a view of quality excludes what we have come to understand as praxis or morally committed action (Wildman, 1995), which would emphasise a critical approach to practices seen to deny social justice rather than a blind acceptance of legislation and a technical response to it. This is not to say that educational managers should not do their best within contexts over which they have little control, but to deplore the idea that quality management can only focus on the means and make little comment about the ends!
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