Schools are organizations in a transitional period. Not only because of the trends and developments in education in itself, but also because of the way schools as organizations are coming from an industrial XIXth, early XXth century model into the real world of the XXIst century. Therefore, schools are in transition from a class based industrial organization to a much more cooperative, diverse and plastic setting. In this context, “quality” work and principles have made its way into the school and, more recently, into the classroom. Process management in the classroom is a new tool for innovation and improvement in transitional times.

In this context, the paper addresses the question of how teachers and school leaders address the issues of classroom core processes management (cultural approaches: adhesion to or avoidance of TQM jargon and approaches) and the benefits or weaknesses they find in the TQM approach to the classroom. The field of this research is a group of six schools (three from Nord-Trøndelag in Norway and three from Sintra in Portugal) that participate in a Comenius Regio project. This project address the issue of classroom process management through the TQM model for public sector, the Common Assessment Framework (CAF). The research is carried out within the conceptual framework of “total quality management”, CAF self-assessment and work coordination theories (Mintzberg). The fact that schools from Portugal and Norway participate in the research enriches the data as the teachers and principals have very different backgrounds and cultural settings.

The fundamental concepts of excellence have been introduced after a large empiric work for the development of the EFQM model. This model is regarded the father of the TQM, and many others have followed. Today, this kind of approach would rather be named Total Quality Leadership, thus the years have made a distinct difference between those terms. In Europe, the work with fine-tuning a TQM model for the public sector could see its success just at the turn of the century. Based upon the Speyer and EFQM model, the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) where launched for the use of self-assessment in all kind of public sector organisations (since 2010 also an edition for education). By 2015, almost 4000 public sector organisations see the benefits from working with this operational quality approach.

Assessing the school or learning institution with the use of a TQM instrument,  takes you through both the enablers and the different aspect of results, to be able to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses. In this way, the different organisational functions become more distinct, and as a school leader, you will be able to see the possibilities for development by providing energy and direction for performing the learning processes (and other core processes) through your people, with the help of plans, strategies, partners and other resources. Mapping, designing and improvement of your processes will provide more clearness when carrying out the most important activities in the organisation, most often the learning processes. Those core processes of learning are crucial for the learning results and other results of the institution. The process design supports the TQM approach, and gives opportunities for the colleagues of teachers to discuss and agree upon common pedagogical strategies and steps to improve the learning results.

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