QUALITY ASSURANCE
SYSTEMS, TQM AND
THE NEW
COLLEGIALISM
Lee Harvey
Senior Research Fellow
Quality in Higher Education
University of Central England in Birmingham
1995
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
ISO9000 and TQM are systems of quality assurance that have been successfully
introduced in some industrial and commercial settings and advocates argue that higher
education would equally benefit from their implementation.
However there is little evidence that higher education will ever widely adopt either model
in anything approaching a pure form. Indeed, the enthusiasm for them as quality
assurance and control mechanisms in higher education is subsiding. Instead, a new
collegialism is emerging that overtly addresses quality issues at the teacher-learner
interface.