A quarterly publication of AQU Catalunya
In recent years the SUC has taken clear steps towards a new paradigm characterised by strengthening the autonomy of university institutions.
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For almost a decade now, institutional accreditation has been part of the debate on academic quality assessment models in the Catalan Higher Education System. In fact, the July 2018 issue of this very newsletter published an article entitled In the direction of the institutional accreditation of learning providers. The article announced a paradigm shift that would allow learning providers to go through the accreditation process step by step, and obtain institutional accreditation if they had already renewed accreditation for at least half of the official degrees offered, and obtained SIGQ certification of implementation. At that time, the Agency had issued the first favourable institutional accreditation report for the Pere Tarrés Faculty of Social Education and Social Work at Ramon Llull University (URL). In an article in the same issue of the newsletter (Institutional accreditation: an important step in the right direction), the vice-rector of Academic Policy and assistant to the rector of the URL at that time, Dr. Jordi Riera, spoke of the first major opportunity - after eleven years spent on the formalisation and construction of the European Higher Education Area - to reduce the impact of the overly bureaucratic nature of quality assurance and its technocratic nature, and to move towards the implementation of a genuine culture of quality control that has deep roots, and is both effective and sustainable, rather than merely technocratic.
In the article Towards institutional accreditation in the October 2020 issue, the then Secretary of Universities and Research Dr. Francesc Xavier Grau pointed out that this process was the natural evolution of a system that has already internalized a culture of quality, and an essential step towards reducing the bureaucratic nature of all degree programme accreditation processes, in addition to the volume of detailed work which threatened to collapse the capacity of AQU Catalunya and the quality assurance services of the universities themselves.
To conclude this review, the October 2021 issue of the newsletter published an article entitled Institutional accreditation, which reaffirmed AQU Catalunya's clear commitment to promoting institutional accreditation in the Catalan Higher Education System (SUC), and presented two documents, Standards and Criteria for the Institutional Accreditation of University Centres (2020) and A Guide to the Institutional Accreditation of University Centres (2021). The aim of these documents was to provide guidance to the centres on the areas that AQU Catalunya would be examining in order to verify that the standards for the future renewal of institutional accreditation are met.
Six years have passed since that July 2018, and there are currently 57 centres within the Catalan Higher Education System (SUC) that have already gained initial institutional accreditation. This represents 29% of Catalan university centres, but this figure is somewhat misleading, because these centres provide 41% of degree qualifications. Furthermore, the first of these centres (the Faculty of Social Education and Social Work Pere Tarrés) has already passed the first accreditation renewal process.
As established by the Renewal of institutional accreditation of university centres procedures (published in 2023, still in the pilot phase), centres that have already gained initial institutional accreditation must follow up and renew their accreditation through an assessment process that involves a visit from an external assessment committee, and a subsequent decision by the Specific Institutional Assessment Commission (CEAI). In the six-year period during which institutional accreditation is valid, AQU Catalunya and the Catalan universities plan the assessment processes so that there is an evaluation in the third year, and a renewal visit in the fifth, in order to ensure that all of the centre's degrees are automatically accredited before the six-year deadline.
Based on the experience of the first year in which AQU Catalunya evaluated the monitoring of ten centres and a renewal of institutional accreditation, the CEAI has drawn some preliminary conclusions, which were presented at the seminar "Monitoring and Renewal of Institutional Accreditation: Initial Experience".
The initial conclusion has to do with the importance that university policies and strategies have in evaluation systems. This is an aspect that being new - it had not been a key factor in previous assessment processes - poses certain difficulties when it comes to evaluation, both internally and externally. Specifically, the standard of institutional accreditation methodology related to this strategic element (dimension 1) asks institutions to have ‘a formally adopted strategy and policies, with the involvement of stakeholders, to strengthen and develop the quality and relevance of training programmes on an ongoing basis’. This is broken down into specific standards that refer to areas such as the framework for the relationship between the centre and the university, the governance of the centre, the training offered, and specific policies such as human resources, internationalisation, distance learning and sustainable development. We have a challenge ahead of us: to consolidate the evaluation of these standards as a key aspect of quality assurance in the centres.
A second conclusion concerns the need for evaluation to evolve, shifting from a perspective in which it is the official degrees on offer that are to be analysed to one that focuses on the functioning of the university centre itself - and therefore also of course on reflection on ways to improve. The centres that are currently within the Catalan Higher Education System have proved efficient in identifying information and indicators for the improvement of Bachelor's degrees, Master's degrees and doctoral programmes, but the analysis needs to go beyond the mere aggregation of degree programme data, and to be approached from a holistic point of view, looking at the centre's educational offer, introducing elements of risk management.
The third conclusion is related to the need for universities to continue to further develop the implementation of internal quality assurance systems (IQAS), and for those IQAS to be further developed in order to efficiently manage the requirements arising from the transition to institutional accreditation. Although the centres that have taken this step have received certification for the introduction of an IQAS, AQU Catalunya has not considered specific monitoring or renewal of this certification. Rather, it is subsumed within the framework for the monitoring and renewal of institutional accreditation. It is therefore considered essential that the teams in charge of the centres maintain their commitment to enhancing the improvement processes already in place, and to extending the culture of quality throughout the whole of the community within the centre.
In short, it can be said that in recent years the SUC has taken clear steps towards a new paradigm characterised by strengthening the autonomy of university institutions, moving towards recognition and promotion of institutional responsibility in assuring the quality of their educational offer, and confidence in the efficacy of the processes introduced, ensuring ongoing improvement. However, the road ahead is not without its challenges, despite the very positive results of the first monitoring and institutional accreditation processes.