As is well known, the Law’s structure takes a broad stance, with the idea of giving universities room for manoeuvre in its deployment. The universities will be able to define aspects that are now written in a general way, but in return the government will be able to address the issues it deems necessary by royal decree. We do not know whether, between these two extremes of the scale, university autonomy will be strengthened or weakened.
In relation to teaching staff, the proposals are worrying. I will comment on two aspects: the teaching assigned and the type of teaching staff. With regard to teaching, the Law modifies the types of teaching credits assigned to teaching staff. If this were to be approved, it would generate very high cost overruns for the different university systems in Spain. Who will finance it? Even more worrying, however, is the minimisation of the number of employed teaching staff, an issue which, if the Law is passed, would have a significant impact on the Catalan university system in particular and could hinder the continuity of the teaching staff model that was set in motion by the Law on universities in Catalonia (LUC). In addition, the draft LOSU opens the door to the accreditation of civil servant teaching staff by the agencies when it states that ANECA will agree, by means of an agreement, to the development of the assessment of these merits and competencies by the regional quality agencies. How will the agreements be designed so as not to collide with European standards?
The impression is that a major opportunity is being missed to explicitly recognise that agencies with ENQA European accreditation and EQAR registration are indisputably guaranteed operational independence in order to fulfil the mandate conferred on them by European standards. In other words, it should be clear that quality assurance will be implemented under the conditions and through the assessment, certification and accreditation procedures established by the assessment agencies, in accordance with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area.
Uncertainties are present in other areas. This is the case, for example, of the targets and their link to the additional funding thatwill be established on the basis of the fulfilment of strategic objectives set in the multiannual programming. The Law states that these targets will be linked, among others, to the improvement of teaching, research – including open science and citizen science programmes, knowledge transfer and exchange, innovation, lifelong learning, internationalisation, interuniversity cooperation and participation in projects and networks, gender equality, recognition of diversity and universal accessibility. How will all this be put into effect?
In any case, it would have been a good idea to make it very clear that the promotion, assurance and guarantee of quality is the responsibility of universities and that assessment agencies are the main instrument for the promotion, assessment and external assurance of universities’ quality.
Evidence that this has not been done is the Law’s treatment of institutional accreditation. The term only appears once to tell us that “the Government will regulate the procedure and conditions for the institutional accreditation of university centres, based on the recognition of the university’s capacity to guarantee its academic quality”. It goes without saying that we would have preferred a more relevant and forceful statement. Perhaps royal decrees would not be necessary if a sentence such as, “Institutionally accredited centres will be autonomous in drawing up the validation report, in accordance with the procedures accredited by the quality agencies”, had been included, but we already sense that the draft bill has opted for prior control and not for placing its trust in the culture of accountability.
We have tried to express the concern mentioned at the start of this text with a few examples. To sum up, there is room for improvement in the draft bill and, in the case of the university quality assurance agencies, AQU Catalunya is convinced of the need to reduce uncertainties and to better clarify their roles and duties in the final text of the Law.