Public organizations in our country are at pains to improve productivity among all employees. One of the greatest challenges facing South Africa since it’s re-entry into the international community is issues of quality relating to productivity. Schools as sites of imparting knowledge, skills, values and attitudes are expected to be responsive at the level of teaching for quality and being characterized as institutions of quality.  There is a growing concern by the Department of Education, over the quality of education and possible initiatives to improve teaching practices. The Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS) is a proposed quality initiative.  It intends to bring all the systems dealing with development, training and evaluation of educators under a single banner.  IQMS consists of three programmes: Developmental Appraisal, Performance Measurement and Whole School Evaluation. It intends enhancing and monitoring performance within education. Despite the acceptance that increasing productivity and issues of quality are essential, recent research conducted by the University of Johannesburg indicates that some critical issues pertaining to various stakeholders for ‘quality’ implementation, at the various levels of the education hierarchy, are problematic, hence the focus of the symposium: Quality assurance issues in South African education.  The session will be divided into the following sub-areas:

• Introduction
• The educator and quality assurance
• Quality assurance challenges for school management: responding to environmental changes
• Parental involvement and quality assurance issues at school 
• The role of school districts in the advocacy of effective quality assurance programmes
• Questions to the panel / discussion