Abstract:

One of the basic aspects of educational policy in all education institutions, including those of vocational education, is the issue of education quality. The decisive prerequisite for a successful functioning of the educational process and improvement of its quality is creating a structure of a quality management system in which priority is given to sustainability and which enhances the intellectual and professional development of employees working in police and border guard institutions under rapidly changing conditions of their professional activity. For the management and assurance of quality, leaders of the education institutions may choose between some of several already existing quality management systems or develop their own variant. However, a certain problem is posed by the great variety of possibilities of choice among the wide range of methods and principles of creating management systems, as well as by the absence of scientifically valid criteria for making the respective choice, which, taking into consideration the specificity of organizing, administrating and financing vocational education of the police and border guard employees, entails risks to both useless involvement and use of national resources and to the sustainability of quality of specialized vocational education in general.

The research aim is to study the efficiency of basic resources and their elements in quality management systems of education institutions in the field of police and border guards, as well as to define the most topical basic principles of designing a quality management system, by using a previously developed hierarchical model of a quality management system of the educational process and the method of a hierarchical analysis.

Within the framework of the research, twenty experts from the Baltic states, working in the field of the professional training of police and border guard employees, have been interviewed, all the resources and elements, defined in the hierarchical model of quality management system, analyzed and assessed, as well as their mutual comparative correlation by their impact on the quality of the educational process studied. The obtained theoretical and empiric data provide a scientifically valid frame for the action of the education institutions in the professional field of the police and border guards at choosing the basic principles of designing a quality management system.

Keywords:

Quality management system, basic principles, professional field of the police and border guards.