Project

About the project

Assuring quality of teaching and learning activities is the quintessential task that higher education institutions must face in an increasingly competitive national and international environment. Adoption of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) in 2005 has added new momentum to research in the quality assurance policy domain. 

So far, the corresponding research has centred on national (quality assurance agencies), not institutional level, and lacked the outreach to secondary education as well as the theoretical base. The project aims to fill in this gap in theoretical and empirical knowledge and to identify barriers to the ESG Part 1 implementation, and, based on that, to provide recommendations to modification of this document. The research will be done will be done on a sample of 28 HEIs in 7 European countries (CZ, GB, LV, PT, PL, SK, NL).

In concrete terms, the objectives of the project are as follows: 

a) description of policy practise at institutional level; 

b) identification of barriers of the ESG Part 1 implementation at institutional level in the following domains: access, student participation, institutional governance and management, employers including private sector, teaching staff, information systems, quality and secondary education; 

c) comparison of similarities and differences in the ESG Part 1 implementation;

d) analysis of the impact of the ESG Part 1 implementation on secondary education;

e) formulation of recommendations on ESG Part 1 modification, including the pertaining guidelines; 

f) publication of the book and the final synthesis report; 

g) dissemination of examples of good (best) practice. These project outputs will aid in informed policy-making in the quality assurance domain, with respect to facilitation of the implementation of the ESG Part 1 in particular, i.e. ENQA (and partners), management of HEIs, chairs of secondary schools, ministries of education, interested higher education research community.