Abstract:

After quality assurance, quality system and quality care, the latest “trend” in education is working on quality culture. As the Minister of Education, Culture and Science (Dutch: Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschappen; OCW) writes in her letter to the Dutch Lower House: “It is the task of the school Boards to ensure that all work on quality culture”. Thus the QUAL4T2 project focusses on improvement of the quality culture in teams. It is a follow-up to the QUAL4T project, which was focused on raising the quality awareness of individual teachers. Teachers not only highlighted the value of the first project, but also expressed the need for follow-up of the project in the final feedback they gave. QUAL4T pilots took place in The Netherlands, UK, Spain and Italy. Now, in QUAL4T2, partners provide several instruments gathered in a toolkit, that can help teacher teams to improve themselves. The toolkit is based on the outcomes of a questionnaire which was administered in organizations of five different countries, to get qualitative feedback from teams. They were also asked to reflect individually on the four quality portraits, as developed by The Dutch National Reference Point of European Quality Assurance in Vocational Education and Training (NLQAVET). The basis of this approach, which is now being piloted, is to think about quality; the teams themselves should develop awareness of their current quality culture and choose their focus points, based on their own outcomes of the questionnaire. This is strongly linked to thinking instruments such as “Peer to peer review” and “Giving effective feedback”.

Keywords:

Quality culture, quality assurance, quality portraits, NLQAVET, teams, education.