CC BY
38
QUALITY AND ASSESSMENT OF SECONDARY VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
M. S. Sumbatyan
The increasing need for technicians provides for expedited development of the secondary vocational education system. There is an increasing demand for professional education organizations to provide training. It is determined in EU documents that “the quality of education must comply with the values, goals and objectives of the three groups of users: students, buyers of educational services on the labour market and society in general.”
Key words: professional education, accessibility, quality, effectiveness, education quality assessment, social partners.
The increasing need for technicians provides for expedited development of the system of secondary vocational education, but it primarily requires a radical change in the quality of education rather than just increasing the scale of specialist training.
The quality of vocational education for technicians is determined by the ability to satisfy the quite specific needs of the society and the economy in this group. A factor of the quality of education is the adequacy of the education outcome to the existing needs. Accordingly, ensuring the quality of vocational education is supposed to mean any policy, system or process aimed at maintaining and increasing the quality of the educational product created in a college. The optimal quality level is to be determined by clients, product consumers and parties interested in successful manufacture of the products. This approach to quality is gaining ground in vocational education in the European Union. The EU documents state that the quality of education “must comply with the values, goals and objectives of the three groups of users: students, buyers of educational services on the labour market and society in general” [1]. A similar definition of the notion of “the quality of education” is given in the Code of Education of the Russian Federation: “The quality of education is the ability of the educational process to satisfy the needs of organizations, institutions, society and the state for qualified human resources and to satisfy the needs of learners for the level of knowledge, abilities and skills which will enable them to be in demand in the professional environment, to successfully adapt in social life, and to be useful to the society and the state” [2]. The quality of education is primarily the aggregate qualities of the components of the entire educational system. In this respect, the quality assurance system may be considered to be the aggregate of the tools and technologies used to create conditions ensuring achievement of the specialist training level meeting the criteria or standards set by the society.
The system of education in every particular country is related to its social-cultural medium and manufacturing and technological base by multiple complicated functional relations and dependences. At present, when advanced states have practically resolved the task of universal secondary education, and higher education has reached a wide scale, these relations and dependences have rightly become a public and state priority. Effectiveness and quality are known to be the key parameters evidencing the social-economic significance of the sphere
450
of education. But while effectiveness is usually considered to be an economic or economic-management category, the notion of quality including cognitive and cultural aspects of education alongside with economic ones is, therefore, perceived as a comprehensive integral characteristic of educational activities. While education effectiveness is determined, among other things, qualitatively, i.e. depending on the selected approach (internal or external effectiveness, cost-related or statistical-parametric one) or the research object (educational institution or its division, system of education as a whole or its particular stage), no generally accepted definition has been found to define its quality. Such a situation is accounted for, firstly, by the ambiguity of the very notion of quality, its different aspects and interdependences, being generally impossible to present in an adequately formalized way. Secondly, the principal public groups directly participating in the educational process or assessing and using its results (students, teachers, education executives, employers) have different ideas about the quality of education and, hence, set different requirements for it.
The problem of education quality assessment has always existed, but it is only in recent years that we have witnessed an outlined systemic comprehensive approach to its solution. Russian and foreign scientists and practical workers study the problems of education quality: they develop the very notion of “quality of education” as well as the assessment criteria, identify the factors ensuring high quality, study the issues of education quality management and monitoring, etc. Assurance of consistent quality of education through the introduction of mutually recognized quality assessment systems is one of the conditions of rapprochement of European countries in forming a single European educational space. National systems of quality assessment currently available in different countries differ greatly both in terms of goals and objectives, criteria and procedures, as well as many other parameters, including the degree of involvement of governmental (state) and nongovernmental and professional bodies and institutions in this process. Although it has been officially declared everywhere that the objective of quality assessment is maintaining it at the level of the assigned standards or its improvement, in practice there are great differences in the very understanding of the task which ranges from the need to tighten control through extension and improvement of reporting, to narrowing the quality assessment down to selfassessment of the educational institution mostly. Nevertheless, it is acknowledged in every case that education quality assessment is to be based on two components: internal (self-assessment) and external components, and the particular mechanisms of determining these components may differ.
Colleges increasingly become dependent on the quality of student training taking into account such factors as: (a) growing competition between EIs; (b) the influence of the labour market and employers’ requirements; (c) interest of the students themselves in high quality education (especially if it is paid education) and receiving good knowledge, abilities and skills for employment; (d) student exchange at the international level; (e) finally, regular external quality assessment by the Ministry of Education of the RF. The law “On Education in the Russian Federation” provides for a list of notions used to regulate the sphere of education and to define these notions. Special attention should be paid to the notion of “quality of education” contained in the law, which is defined as “an integrated
451
characteristic of education expressing the degree of its conformity to the federal state educational standards (educational standards) and the federal state requirements and/or needs of the customer of educational services, including the degree of achievement of the planned results of the educational program.” Today the quality of education presupposes conformity both to educational standards and to the needs of the customer of educational services. Furthermore, the definition of the quality of education as conformity to the standard presupposes two variants of the decision (conforms / fails to conform) as the result of the process of determining this conformity. At the same time it is evident that education quality assessment presupposes the need for the availability of different results of such an assessment, which cannot be reduced just to “yes” or “no” categories.
Therefore, the critical task is to develop and apply mechanisms ensuring conformity of the quality of education to the customer’s needs. We suppose that under the term “customer” we should understand not just the party to the agreement for paid educational services, but local self-government bodies and state authorities financing educational institutions within their jurisdiction with a view to ensuring provision of services to the people entitled to receive free education, and thus acting as customers, as well as to other participants - social partners.
References
1. Кривошеев В.Ф. Проблемы роста качества среднего профессионального образования в условиях модернизации образовательного процесса.
2. Кодекс Российской Федерации об образовании (проект). - М.: ИПР СПО, 2003. - 23 с.
Translated from Russian by Znanije Central Translastions Bureas
452
