QALead

The past 20 years have seen significant investments in Quality Assurance infrastructure across Europe, thanks largely to the focus on quality assurance provided by the Bologna Process. Starting with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) and European Quality Assurance in Vocational Education and Training (EQAVET,) a multitude of standards provide guidance as to what constitutes quality. Quality approaches in institutions vary widely, and despite efforts to the contrary, often quality assurance is reduced to a “commitment to quality culture” supported by a bureaucratic and time consuming set of checks, often in the form of evaluation questionnaire of various kinds.

About the course

In fact, according to analysis from the European Commission contained in the Modernisation Agenda for Education, educational institutions are not:

Right skills

Equipping enough people with the right skills for modern society

Doing enough

Doing enough to tackle social divisions, in particular with regards to people from low socioeconomic and migrant backgrounds

Contribution

Contributing enough to innovation in the places they are located, and

Organized

Organised and funded in a way that allows them to work well.

Quality assurance policy in Europe has either been unable to detect or unable to resolve these issues. It is our hypothesis that this is due to quality assurance which is applied nearly exclusively a course/programme level rather than at institutional-strategy level, where it can be a lever for organizational transformation.

In analysing this phenomenon, we have identified a lack of formalised expertise in quality management amongst institutional top management as a key barrier limiting uptake. Often institutional leaders will have never received any formal training in QA-management, and thus, while having significant expertise as to what constitutes quality education, will have limited expertise in how to translate that mission and vision into a management system based on clear quality objectives, backed up by steady processes that will assure the adequate planning and realization of activities leading to the achievement of those objectives, as well as monitoring and analysing processes that will enable continual improvement. The QA Lead project aims to address this gap by developing training & resource specifically tailored to supporting institutional leaders in their strategic role towards Quality Assurance.

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