Abstract:

Having a good quality education system is one of the key elements that defines a society’s level of well-being and determines its future possibilities. Among the various elements making up the Spanish education system, vocational training is especially important nowadays from both the people perspective and the socio-economic viewpoint. From the human resources point of view, it allows most young people to channel their vocation and supplies them with competences to practice a profession. It includes training programs that allow employees who work to be up-to-date, which facilitates their promotion, but also programs that address unemployed workers to provide them with more opportunities to return to the labor market. From a socio-economic perspective, a good vocational training system allows companies to find qualified workers who facilitate the survival and progress of these companies in an increasingly competitive and global setting.

Vocational training has acquired a strategic value in training in Spain because of its capacity to meet not only the Spanish society’s training demands, but also the production sector’s requirements. Public Vocational Training Centres (PVTCs), these being public centres that teach vocational training, were created in Spain, in their current form, in 2005. They were conceived as places where learning is promoted for a large population who have different interests, and they also offer multidimensional learning resources. Adapting Spanish vocational training to a changing socio-economic context has meant having to make the system flexible in training terms, and seeking better efficiency and efficacy to manage its resources. PVTCs were conceived during the crisis that Spain is currently suffering, and the public administration has had to keep up-to-date and integrate business management practices that allow it to achieve higher levels of productivity, efficiency and efficacy in its tasks. To this end, ever since these centres were set up, they have become reference centres for integrating the two vocational training subsystems and their organizational and functional regulation, which addresses more efficient and efficacious management, as defined in terms of excellence.

The concern about improving students’ performance and setting up more efficient outlines for educational centres’ organization and management has driven the design of education management models everywhere. Quality of education, related to education centres’ management, is defined as increasingly transparent results, promoting more autonomy and specialization in these centres, and expecting students, teachers and centres to provide reports. These principles reflect the need to apply economy and efficiency criteria in using public resources, to reinforce their autonomy, to encourage management tasks, and to design a quality education project that assumes teaching centre’s specialization as a guarantee of quality teaching.

Our study seeks to contribute to the literature by focusing upon this issue. This paper analyses the historical evolution of management in public education centres and the implementation of the philosophy of Total Quality Management (TQM), more specifically in PVTCs.

Keywords:

Quality management, TQM, public sector, education centres.