Benchmarking the Quality of Secondary Education at the Micro Level and Policy Imperatives

Abstract

Different schools (& board of examinations) have students with different expectations from the school and different perceptions about the quality of education they receive from the school. It is therefore necessary for the schools to create objective benchmarks in order to know where they stand currently in satisfying the student’s expectations. These benchmarks may be used in the future to gauge the impact of policies implemented in order to improvise the situation. Also, these benchmarks can be used to compare the performance of various schools. In the first part of this paper, we create the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) house of quality (a matrix) for the secondary level students of a prominent school (with ICSE board of examination) at Lucknow, India. In this process, we come across various expectations (with respect to curriculum, teachers & examinations) of the students and evolve policies in consultation with the Principal of the School in order to satisfy these expectations in a better way. The QFD house of quality generates objective rankings of the priority to be attached to various policies for implementation. In the second part, QFD house of quality was created for secondary level students of another prominent school (with CBSE board of examination) at Lucknow, India. It was found that some expectations of the students in this school were different from that of the other school. In the last part of the paper, we compare the performance of the two schools on various student expectations, which are common to both the schools. In this process, the better performing school (& the board of examination) becomes a benchmark for the other on various expectations. On the remaining unique expectations of students, the school’s own performance becomes an objective benchmark. It was found that both the schools were benefited in terms of improvising the quality of secondary education by implementing the policy imperatives arising out of this exercise.

Keywords: Benchmarking quality, Quality Function Deployment, Secondary education, Policy implications