Quality management in elementary school : How do school relate to the concept of customer, goal achievement and quality? A study of ten elementary schools quality reports.

Since the nineties the words customer, effectiveness and quality have become part of everyday school life. Municipalities’ makes regular customer surveys to measure both independent schools as municipal schools ' quality. A common method for customer research and background studies is that parents and students are asked to respond to simple Web-based surveys. Customer satisfaction and/or customer dissatisfaction options are presented in tabular form, based on the percentage that expresses a particular position within a query. The measure of customer satisfaction and quality, risks being the ability to satisfy individual targets – not to maximize public benefit. The school is the cutoff point between mission to nurture democratic citizenship and to compete for students with other providers. This situation creates many a dilemma – not least when the measure of quality is squeezed into quality methods that can only measure what is easily measurable, such as statistics of amount of examination, national test scores and customer satisfaction. Can the school's complex operations, quality and effectiveness (customer value) be measured with the industry and business methods, parameters and in percent? The aim of my study is to investigate if these methods and the quality management practice had an impact at school and if so – discuss how and if this influenced the writing of quality reports. Ten randomly selected schools ' quality reports have been examined quantitatively, qualitatively analyzed and interpreted. It is possible to find traces of industrial-quality thinking in quality reports and see a link to the New Public Management? The notion that quantity measure ratings statistics and results of national tests is assumed to indicate schools' quality. Quality reports in elementary school does not work for describing schools quality so that quality becomes possible to compare between different schools, nor as a concrete tool to drive school improvement and quality improvements in schools' everyday work