Application of ISO 9000 Standards to Education and training

Over the last decade the topics Quality , Quality Assurance and (Total) Quality Management have become a central preoccupation of hundreds of thousands of organisations in Europe. It was the industrial world which first recognized that much of the growth and economic success of Japan could be attributed to the consistent focus of companies on quality and quality improvement. Since the mid-80s in particular, European firms have started to adopt the concepts and methods of Total Quality Management - in short ' TQM ' - to meet the quality level which customers expect and for improving continuously the quality of products and services they deliver. One of the more visible features of this 'quality wave' has been, particularly in Europe, the certification of the quality assurance mechanisms on the basis of the ISO 9000 Standards . Despite the fact that the ISO 9000 norms cover only a sub-set of the TQM principles, this form of certification is becoming the de facto basic quality standard in many industrial sectors of the more developed European countries. As an example, in the chemical industry in the Rotterdam port area it has become almost impossible for any type of supplier to deliver products or services without being an ISO 9000 certified company. In the United Kingdom, an ISO 9000 certificate has already been awarded to tens of thousands of organisations. Most other European industrial sectors and regions are catching up in this regard. By the end of 1996), over 100 000 organisations in the world had been certified, the large majority of these being European.