Quality Assurance is not inspection, but contains it as an important tool of evaluation. Mauritius has known the most classical form of inspection as practised in France and Belgium, focusing on individual classrooms and individual teachers. This form of inspection has been resented by the current brood of teachers who have grown used to working with a great measure of individual autonomy, neither seeing the need to know what other teachers are doing in their classrooms nor accepting the necessity of senior management observing or evaluating the quality of their teaching.

Teaching levels in an accountability-free society

The quality of teaching has gone from bad to worse in the absence of in-service training, occasional reflections on the fitness of the pedagogy used. The fact that 70% pass their CPE, SC or HSC has never been questioned. The 20% few have benefited from school at the expense of the 50% who scrape through with grades ranging from D to U. No one has bothered about qualitative improvement because no one was accountable. Success was attributed to the teacher and failure to the pupil and his background. In the absence of real and reliable tools of measurements only pupil attainment has become unambiguously concrete and appealing as benchmarks for teachers and those who have an interest in monitoring and comparing teacher effectiveness.

■ <B> Implications for setting up a QA division</B>

Today specialists promote the idea of self-evaluation as a major tool of quality development. Quality assurance contains inspection but goes beyond a purely external exercise of monitoring for accountability. The democratization of society has revolutionized the very concept of the evaluator, who practises his evaluation together with the incumbent to be evaluated, rather than create a victim of the subjectivity of the external evaluator.

Quality assurance provides:

(a) the accountability perspective by giving data on performance, effectiveness and value for money;

(b) the knowledge perspective by generating new insights about the quality of what matters in a school - leadership, ethos, learning and teaching;

(c) the developmental perspective by providing opportunities for strengthening the capacity of the school for self- improvement.

■ <B>What does Quality Assurance offer?</B>

(i) internal evaluation by making every worker conscious of his mandate, fulfil it according to measurable standards, benchmark his objectives and formulate targets. The Performance Management system will reinforce this internal evaluation;

(ii) external evaluation done with independence, rigour and fairness as too intrusive a control does not lead to real improvement in quality, but rather to an equivalent of ?teaching-to-the-test? namely ?teaching-to-the-regulations?. This evaluation concerns teaching and learning, and classroom management.

(iii) Quality Assurance concerns a whole school rather than parts of the school. QA needs to define the framework for:

? Assets management

? Teaching and learning

? School ethos

? School leadership

? Discipline

? Pupils? welfare and performance

? Links between the school and the community

? Improvement driven projects

? Human Resource development initiatives

In fact this division should come up with a report on every school once every five years and identify the training needs resulting from performance gaps found according to agreed benchmarks.

■ <B>Recruitment</B>

It is a fact that unless Primary School Inspectors are postgraduates with at least 10 years of proven experience in Teacher Training, Curriculum Development or Inspection they are destined to disappear as a cadre and will not find its place in the QA Division. The ministry must, henceforth, recruit only graduates with a masters degree working in primary schools if they want to join the QA Division.

Pedagogical inspectors from the PSSA are the first candidates who may be considered for the QA Division. But the ministry must have a varied mix of Quality Assurance officers from the private Sector or parastatal bodies like the MIE, MGI or MES so that the division may benefit from the best brains for an exercise, which does not compromise over quality.

Without accountability at every stage, public service is a spineless organism that exists for its own sake. Today quality assurance can make schooling bring a meaningful difference to the life of the citizen by causing the plus value. We have a wonderful opportunity to guarantee the worth of every rupee invested in education.