Internal and External Quality Assurance

The standards and guidelines on quality assurance that have been developed by the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) were adopted by the ministers at the Bergen Conference in 2005 highlight the central importance of institutional autonomy in the context of quality assurance. Consequently, main responsibility for the quality of provision and its evaluation lies with higher education institutions themselves.

However, given the fact that publicly funded institutions are accountable to society, the quality of higher education needs to be safeguarded. The aim of the standards and guidelines is therefore to assist institutions in managing their quality. Institutions and agencies themselves should determine the specific procedures to be adopted in their own particular context, so suggestions for detailed ‘procedures’ have not been included in the ENQA recommendations.

The purpose of this overview is to indicate whether education authorities issue regulations on the organization of quality assurance with the aim of supporting higher education institutions (and possibly reinforcing the political message of the guidelines adopted in Bergen), or whether they leave institutions either wholly or partially free to devise their own quality assurance measures.