Quality assurance and enhancement by AQU Catalunya encompasses not only the numerous review and accreditation procedures involving study programmes and teaching staff that it undertakes every year, but also the development, introduction and implementation of the requisite “institutional accreditation” of learning providers (faculties and schools), which is currently taking place in particularly difficult conditions given the negative effects of the reduced number of site visits as a result of covid-19, the socio-economic crisis and the resulting resource constraints; in addition to this there is limited understanding and recognition by state-run institutions of the work and accreditation activities that AQU Catalunya undertakes in accordance with European QA standards, with continual interference and even proposals for new regulations that systematically impinge on the Agency's jurisdiction and, by extension, the statute-recognised jurisdiction of Catalonia in higher education. Recent drafts of new legislation (royal decrees) dealing with teaching and research staff at higher education institutions, based on a nationwide definition for a framework for the career pathway of contract academic staff that was originally developed in Catalonia, clearly shows the danger that what was meant to be a goodwill initiative to nationally extend the positive outcomes of the experience in Catalonia will paradoxically lead to its demise through the centralised standardisation of academic positions, criteria and even the appointment mechanisms.
Institutional accreditation represents the natural evolution of a system that has already internalised the quality culture but above all else is an essential step towards reducing both the red tape in programme accreditation and the volume of detailed work that threatens to overwhelm the capacity of both AQU Catalunya and the universities' QA services.
With the growth and consolidation of a strong and compact higher education system in Catalonia with an increasingly expanding presence in global rankings and recognition at international level, this additional step needs to be made so that the current automatic (and bureaucratic) accreditation procedure based on a percentage of programmes that have been accredited evolves into an authentic system for the monitoring, certification and accreditation of internal quality assurance procedures, with periodic reaccreditation serving as an aid to self-criticism and institutional enhancement and not merely being the acknowledgment of whether a given performance threshold in the form of a certain percentage number of accredited degrees has been passed, which can mask undesirable trends and situations at the local level.
The current dynamic, which is based on programme accreditation, has come as far as it can; it has been instrumental in mainstreaming the quality culture, but the problem is that its stagnation may also be counter-productive. An institution's lack of a general overview in any accreditation procedure leads to the defining of corpuses of knowledge that correspond to each degree programme and are independent of each other when in actual fact they are generally shared at faculty/school level, if not at the level of the entire institution. It is therefore now imperative for the organisation, procedures and resources of a faculty or school to be comprehensively analysed together with all of the programmes it delivers.
This proposal for specific institutional accreditation, as to one that is automatic, which is at present complementary and incipient but necessary, will keep AQU Catalunya at the forefront and leading the way in the field of higher education quality in southern Europe, as was the case more than 20 years ago. And this is the way that, as AQU Catalunya's experience up until the present has shown, will continue to increase flexibility and autonomy in the system, as well as reducing bureaucratic red tape and costs.
AQU Catalunya has always pointed the way forwards and given impetus to quality in higher education and it will continue to do so, in terms of study programmes and teaching staff; the effectiveness and efficiency of the quality assurance procedures and accreditations that of necessity help build confidence in the system for the labour market, industry and enterprise, and society as a whole, that higher education is working well and meets international standards of quality. It is not at all surprising that in recent years the most highly rated public professionals and institutions in Catalonia have systematically been university teaching and research staff and the universities themselves.