Quality Management In The Romanian Upper Secondary Education: A Different Internal And External Perspective

The concept of quality management (QM) has increasingly become a critical one over time no matter the industry or the profession in which it is referred to. Under the current challenges that have a great impact on the economy and the society, new requirements and conditions for how the providers of products, services and solutions in general perform in terms of quality have emerged. Taking into account these realities, we may observe that QM in education follows the same path as in all other fields of activity, developing on fundamental principles that are at a certain extent common to all other areas of the economy and of the society in general. In Romania the QM approach in education is governed both by national legislation formulated in compliance with the objectives presented in the strategy of the European Union (EU). Since its accession to the EU Romania entered a process of continuous improvement and transformation to comply with the recommendations made in the field of education. But why is important to discuss the QM in upper secondary education, what is the most appropriate QM approach and how is quality managed and implemented at the level of the institutions in the upper secondary education in Romania now and what is to be done in the future are some of the questions we tried to provide significant reasoning to. The present article has emerged as a collaboration of two university instructors in Business Process Quality Management and Business Management and one teacher in Business Administration in a high school of Economics in Bucharest incited by the finding that, according to the analysis performed by the university’s admission commission, the majority of the candidates in the admission process are graduates from high schools with specializations in Economics.