Quality Management in Vocational Education and Training: A Reflection on Educational Governance in Austria, Germany and Spain

In many European regions, the introduction of New Public Management in the 1990s led to decentralised school development. The increased freedom of school organisation raised the demand for system-wide coordination and steering elements. Therefore, the development of comprehensive quality management (QM) systems plays a key role in educational governance across Europe. Various QM systems reflect different governance approaches prevailing in individual countries. This paper analyses which understanding of educational governance is reflected by different conceptions of QM in Austrian, German and Spanish VET systems and how the coordination of actions in these complex multilevel systems is shaped by QM? The first findings of this study indicate that it is not the democratisation of the understanding of quality which is in the focus of current QM systems, but the decentralisation of responsibility of predefined outcomes and the operational realisation of governmental requirements. The findings show that in the formalised VET system, the accountability and performativity function seems to be on the rise. In the non-formal VET system, the marketing function is prevalent.