Lebanese catholic schools are considered as NPO’S educational establishment that functions without a formal Quality Management System , its system is without any structure however its management understands deeply the need to introduce and implement QMS for several benefits, mainly school management want to implement it to prove the quality in the school programs with seal of international recognition, in addition they need to manage the quality in a language that parents , students, society and business realize.
The necessity to add structure to the system is a great motivation to the school’s management to have response to teacher’s quality efforts reaching national skill standards. In order to achieve this, the school must have access to the necessary human, financial, and material resources.
The School concerned in this thesis is mentioned under the name of “R” school because it can represent almost all catholic private schools in Lebanon following same policies, which start realizing the importance of change in a safe and professional way that it goes in their own benefit because the competition among schools is high.
A Quality Management System is recommended and it shows how school do operate before QMS and after implementing it and how does it reflects parents’ choice indirectly, when responding to their needs starting staff performance reflecting their professionalism based on training issues to curriculum and students success, to parents involvement and decision making.
Some parents choose a school even if it’s not reputed but it has a high admissions student’s number, and others may choose schools that don’t have auxiliary issues, therefore what satisfy parents and how put school in a continual improvement will be analyzed in this study.
In the first part of the thesis, a global study explains the reputation and the corporate branding of all schools and their determinants in the marketplace. It defines how corporate keep its image in the first place and how this image is created taking into consideration its identity. It is necessary then to emphasize the importance of the Quality Management System to maintain the reputation and the image.
Since school is considered an organization having all its status and students enrollment is 51.6% of the population in Lebanon (World bank 2009), several determinants influence its structure to keep it reputed, from the top management to the client (student), to the stakeholder interference (parent), and those mentioned play the role of sustaining the school success when implementing the Quality Management System.
In the second part, a Lebanese Private Catholic School “R School” was selected in chapter three as a sample; a questionnaire in this regard was distributed to parents, administrative staff and teachers. The answers are assessed through factual observations considering school parents’ choice and clarifying the term of “reputed school” based on the implementation of the Quality Management System.
Finally in chapter four, the thesis describes in table one the actual situation of the “R school” followed by table two as the roadmap to implement the Quality Management System and the positive impact of this implementation and its consequences affecting positively parents’ choice and the pitfalls in this regard if any.
Questions that reveal the thesis and highlights on other criteria are the following:
Research Questions:
- What are the factors that influence school reputation and sustain its success?
- How Quality Management System can enhance school reputation and success?
- What are the expected outcomes of the Quality Management System implementation on parent’s school choice?