Quality Assurance in Western Europe. TRENDS, PRACTICES AND ISSUES
| Date | 01 March 1993 |
| Published date | 01 March 1993 |
| Pages | 4-14 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09684889310046149 |
| Author | Diana Green |
| Subject Matter | Education |
QUALITY ASSURANCE
IN EDUCATION
Quality Assurance
in Western Europe
TRENDS, PRACTICES AND ISSUES
Diana
Green
QUALITY MATTERS
This article provides an overview of quality
assurance in Western Europe, focusing on
teaching and learning. That quality is important,
is taken as axiomatic. What is more difficult is the
task of making any meaningful generalizations
about trends and issues. This is partly because it
implies that there is some consensus about what
quality assurance is, its purpose, how, and by
whom, it should be operated. In practice, the task
is made complex by changing boundaries: the
map of Europe and our definition of "Western
Europe" changes from month to month. At the
same time, higher education within Europe has
been subject to substantial (and, in some case,
continuous) reforms since the early 1980s. The
impact of these reforms on the arrangements for
quality assurance is still not entirely clear.
Currently, there seem to be substantial differences
within and between individual countries in respect
of:
(1) The individual missions and organization of
those institutions delivering higher education
(mainly, but not exclusively, university-type
institutions).
(2) The policy and value systems in which the
universities operate; these in turn affect:
(3) The arrangements by which the quality of
higher education in individual countries is
controlled, audited and assessed.
The provision of an overview is also complicated
by the fact that there is no universally agreed
definition of what is encompassed by "quality
assurance". It is particularly difficult to
determine whether, and in what ways, "quality
assurance" differs from "quality control",
"quality assessment", "quality management",
"quality improvement" and the term used more
frequently in the USA, "accreditation". The
concepts are frequently used interchangeably.
In some countries, an attempt has been made
to distinguish between the terms, partly because
of the proliferation of agencies with an interest in
this burgeoning field and the consequential need
to clarify responsibilities. Thus, in the UK, the
1991 White Paper (Department for Education and
Science, 1991) differentiated between "quality
control", described as the internal procedures for
maintaining and enhancing quality, and two
external procedures: "audit" which involves the
scrutiny of documents and/or procedures; and
"assessment", which focuses on the student
experience and student achievement. Audit and
assessment are further differentiated in so far as
the former results in a quality judgement about
an institution (based on the perceived
effectiveness of its internal procedures), while
the latter results in
a
judgement about the quality
of provision in a specific disciplinary or subject
area (and ultimately provides information about
the relative performance across all providing
institutions). This function has now been given
constitutional legitimacy by the 1992 Further and
Higher Education Act, which allocated
responsibility for external control to two different
institutions. Audit is now the responsibility of the
Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC), an
This article is based on a paper presented to the
Biennial Conference of
the
International Network of
Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education
(INQAAHE), Montreal, Canada, 24-28 May
1993.
The
original version will be published by the Falmer Press
in a book based on the conference proceedings, edited
by Alma Craft.
Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 1 No. 3, 1993, pp. 4-14
© MCB University Press, 0968-4883
4
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