 Quality Assurance is an ongoing process that ensures the delivery of agreed standards. These agreed standards should make sure every educational institution of which the quality is assured has the potential ability to achieve a high quality of content. Quality Assurance must not to be confused with accreditation. The goal of Quality Assurance is to improve education and therefore it should take place on all levels (course, faculty and institution). A central goal of the “Bologna Process” is to define and observe Europe-wide quality standards in higher education. A precondition is the elaboration of comparable methods and criteria to assess the quality of research and teaching. In 1998, the European Council recommended stronger co-operation in this field. As a response to this Council initiative and the objectives of the Bologna Declaration, the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) was established. Since 1999, ENQA has supplied information about proven practical experiences as well as the newest approaches and discussions in the field of quality assessment and quality assurance. In the course of the so-called Bologna Seminars, initial results of the debate on European quality standards for the implementation of Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes were presented in Amsterdam („The European Dimension of Quality Assurance“).
ESU's opinion on the matter
ESU wants to overcome the obstacles to the effective exercise of free movement of students. Quality Assurance is seen by ESU as one of the steps in the direction of pre-recognition of degrees and of periods of study.
For quality assurance the goal of this European dimension should be to achieve transparency of quality assurance systems, not to replace them. Therefore a co-operation should be established, with commonly agreed standards, procedures and guidelines for quality assurance. This co-operation will recognise that a quality assurance system uses the agreed standards, procedures and guidelines. It will however not get involved in the process of quality assurance. ESU stresses the need to have the quality assurance systems represented in the co-operation.
To enhance the quality of education and the mobility of students and graduates in Europe, accreditation agencies should be able to work in the whole European area. However in order to give legitimacy to accreditation agencies working in Europe, a European agreement on methods for accreditation should be made between the different systems of quality assurance. Related Documents Links Contact
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