Effektivitet i grundskolan - en studie om Leans applicerbarhet på processen utvecklingssamtal
Efficiency has become an important objective for many providers of welfare services. Among Swedish schools, both private and public, increased administrative demands seemingly influence operations, and affect teachers negatively through perceived stress. Simultaneously, Swedish students scored an all-time low in the latest PISA survey, and are now performing below the OECD-average in science, mathematics and reading. A central administrative task in the Swedish elementary school is the parent-teacher conference, which is an important activity in supporting the development of the student's knowledge and social skills. Lean is a well-established operations framework, which has proven successful in order to improve process efficiency. The purpose of this thesis was to examine whether Lean principles might be applied on the parent-teacher conference-process in order to improve its efficiency. The method was based upon a qualitative approach where semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers, parents and headmasters at different schools in Uppland, Sweden. Interview data indicate several process inefficiencies, e.g. that all the activities in the process are executed during a short period of time, the IT-systems are unreliable and the templates made for evaluation of the students are not optimized. These inefficiencies relate to the Lean principles of waste from bottlenecks, variability and variation. The analysis accordingly finds that there are potential positive effects of applying Lean on the studied process. The thesis' conclusions recommend a process with a balanced workload, decreased variation through improved quality in the IT-resources and improved templates for evaluation. Implementation of these recommended changes could result in a reduction of waste in the process, leading to improved efficiency.