Abstract:

The Purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between selected total quality management (TQM) practices employed by principals and students’ performance in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) in public secondary schools in Kiambu County, Kenya.  The selected TQM practices were; school focus on meeting students’ needs, goal setting(establishing performance objectives) and communication of curricular issues.    Ex post facto research design was adopted for the  study. Target population consisted of 227 school principals from public secondary schools in Kiambu County and 3736 teachers in these schools. Kiambu County has 10 sub-counties.  Cochran’s sample size formula was used to determine the sample size of 143 principals and 343 teachers. In order to ensure equal representation of principals and teachers from all public secondary schools in the 10 sub-counties, 14 principals (143÷10 sub-counties = 14.3) from schools in each sub-county and 3 teachers [(348 ÷ 10 sub-counties) ÷14 schools = 2.5] from each sample school were selected using simple random sampling technique. A questionnaire developed by the researchers was administered to 140 principals from the sample schools and  420 teachers. Correlations were generated to establish the relationships between the three selected TQM practices employed by school principals and students’ performance. Linear regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis and identify predictor variable for the students’ performance in KCSE. The findings revealed that, school focus on meeting student’s needs, establishment of performance objectives (goal setting) on curricular activities and embracement of high level of communication on curricular issues especially from the students, enhance students’ performance in national examinations.

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