A bimonthly publication of AQU Catalunya

45

November 2009

After three years of holding the position of Director of AQU Catalunya, I believe the Agency's most significant characteristic to be its international dimension, a statement that, based perhaps on its daily activities as perceived by the universities and governed principally by decisions made at the ministerial and government department level and by the Inter-university Council of Catalonia, may cause surprise. And when I say the international dimension I think, above all, in its membership to the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). Its membership to ENQA is, first of all, a recognition of the standing of its activities, or, more specifically, its compliance with the standards of quality assurance adopted in the European Higher Education Area since 2005; a recognition that, since its founding in 2008, is being progressively transferred to the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR), in which AQU Catalunya is also registered. ENQA is really much more however than just a list of agencies that are of high standing: it is an organisation in which its members (not just management, but also, and most importantly, its technical experts) actively collaborate and exchange experience, practices and results through frequents meetings and joint action, and this enables us to maintain a direct view of the state of external quality assurance within the scope of the European framework, which the Catalan universities form part of, through their main stakeholders.

One thing I have observed over these three years of intense contact is that the review processes of AQU Catalunya are comparable with those of the best quality assurance agencies in Europe, and that the defects and shortcomings that are frequently identified and which we try to correct (inadequate public information on reviews, administrative and reviewer training processes, cycles of activity disrupted by administrative regulations, the analysis of student learning outcomes now incorporated into reviews, etc.) are shared, to a greater or lesser degree, by all of the member agencies of ENQA in Europe.

An exception needs to be made at the present time for agencies in the United Kingdom, not so much for the agencies themselves, but for the high degree of autonomy that British universities have traditionally had, together with the high degree of accountability and information transparency. On numerous occasions I have affirmed in the on-line journal that quality assurance processes work best when the universities have more autonomy, and it is difficult for them to cope with regulatory excesses that condition administrative authorisation prior to the outcomes of reviews. All QA agencies would undoubtedly like to be accreditation agencies, i.e. agencies that review academic activities in accordance with a frame of reference that is set and known, and that publicly pronounce their degree of compliance, without the outcome necessarily being linked to any administrative effects.

It is interesting that this scenario of European collaboration has already spread to the sphere of the national state agencies. One of the first measures when I joined the AQU Catalunya Management had to do with the joint work of all of the regional QA agencies and the Spanish national agency (ANECA), even though only a minority of these agencies were working at the European level. It is a shame that Royal Decree 1393/2007, concerning the regulation of recognised degree qualifications and which in many aspects was unfortunate, interfered in this process to establish an arbitrary hierarchy between agencies, in addition to introducing a framework that was excessively rigid for the ex ante accreditation of recognised qualifications. This decree, which has interrupted the programme review activities that AQU Catalunya has been carrying out since 1996, has caused a great deal of harm to the Agency and, I believe, for the entire higher education system in Catalonia. I trust that the stage being initiated by AQU Catalunya corrects this anomaly as soon as possible.