Developing a Quality Framework for Educational Institutions-An Administrative Staff Perspective in the Indian Context

Abstract

The systems approach views an educational institution as an open system comprising a transformation system. with elements within it affected directly or indirectly by the environment outside. With 'effectiveness' and 'quality', both being essential to analyzing the performance of an educational institution, various models, frameworks and approaches have been developed and proposed. With an emphasis on two of such models, viz. , the process and satisfaction models, an attempt may be made to apply the systems approach at developing a Quality Framework for Educational Institutions. Starting with a theoretical background, the paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted 0 11 the administrative staff, so as to obtain the in ternal customer s perspective on quality. The SERVQUAL was applied to identify the gap and determine the level of Service Quality. Following this, the Quality Function Deployment Technique was applied to identify the set of minimum design characteristics/quality components that would meet the requirements of the administrative staff as an internal customer. The adoption of such a framework in educational institutions would lead to the creation of an environment where the administrative staff would be satisfied and in turn, be able to deliver quality service to the other customers and stakeholders.