4 Decreet betreffende de lerarenopleidingen in Vlaanderen, December 15th, 2006, Art.11
& 16
5 Based on data provided by the Ministry of the Flemish Community, Department Education
6 Decreet betreffende de lerarenopleidingen in Vlaanderen, December 15th, 2006, Art.12
External quality assurance in Higher Education
In Flanders the responsibility for internal and external quality assurance of the education is assigned to the institutions them-selves. So, each institution is responsible for its own internal quality assurance. Additionally, each institution is required to submit its bachelor’s and master’s programmes to an external assessment on an eight-yearly basis and to act on the findings and results of this external assessment. Professional bachelor’s teacher training programmes are subject to this system. Up to now, no institutional audits or institutional accreditation is required. The remit of organising external programme assessments was entrusted to VLIR (Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad – Flemish Rector’s Conference)7 for the Flemish universities and VLHORA (Vlaamse Hogescholenraad – Council of Flemish university colleges)8, which are the consultative and advisory bodies of the universities and university colleges since respectively 1976 and 1994. Within VLIR and VLHORA a Quality Assurance Unit carries out the external assessments. Those two Quality Assurance Units are recognised by the Flemish Government, are full members of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) and are registered with the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR). Recently, VLIR and VLHORA established a common structure VLUHR (Flemish Universities and University Colleges Council) which takes over the responsibility of VLIR and VLHORA in the fields of quality assurance and inter-nationalisation.
The external quality assurance system serves a twofold purpose: it is intended to help improve the quality of education, and it helps the institutions to account for the way in which they address quality and quality assurance in the context of a programme.
Essential features of the external quality assurance system are that it takes a programme or cluster of programmes as its starting-point, that it is organised along inter-institutional lines and that it starts with a critical self-evaluation report which the programme coordinators are required to compose. A panel of independent experts,
7 www.vlir.be
8 www.vlhora.be
PART 1 NATIONAL POLICIES AND QUALITY ASSURANCE FRAMEWORKS
composed in consultation with the institutions, then visits the programme(s), forms a judgement about the quality and formulates recommendations for improvement. The process is concluded with the publication of a public assessment report. The reports include a comparative description and comparative tables, but do not have the aim to rank programmes. The programmes are assessed according to 21 quality aspects, which together constitute a programme’s quality profile. So, it is up to the reader of the reports to judge which aspects are most important for him/her and thus to evaluate which programme fits best his/her needs.
On the basis of the assessment framework and the panel’s own discipline-specific reference framework (with this framework, the panel specifies the minimum discipline-specific requirements it believes the programmes should satisfy), the panel assesses the various quality aspects and explains its judgement on each quality aspect in the final report. The panel likewise expresses this judgement on a 4-point scale: unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good and excellent per aspect. At the overarching theme-level (staff, quality assurance, …) the score is unsatisfactory or satisfactory.
It is a deliberate choice to assign the external quality assurance to the umbrella organisations of the institutions. VLUHR believes that strong ownership in the programmes for the external assessment process, clearly contributes to the positive approach of the programmes towards external evaluation and creates the necessary openness to discuss potential measures for quality improvement, a vision which is shared by the Flemish Government. Therefore external assessments are organised by the umbrella organisations of the higher education institutions. Another way to ensure this ownership is the fact that programmes which have to be evaluated are requested to propose members for the assessment panel. They make a list of preferred chair persons for the panel and a long list of potential qualified panel members. On the basis of this list, the panel chair composes the panel. This composition has to be agreed upon by the VLUHR Board, before the panel members are invited.
A main objective of the external quality assurance system is for the institutions to account for the quality they offer, an independent 84
composed in consultation with the institutions, then visits the programme(s), forms a judgement about the quality and formulates recommendations for improvement. The process is concluded with the publication of a public assessment report. The reports include a comparative description and comparative tables, but do not have the aim to rank programmes. The programmes are assessed according to 21 quality aspects, which together constitute a programme’s quality profile. So, it is up to the reader of the reports to judge which aspects are most important for him/her and thus to evaluate which programme fits best his/her needs.
On the basis of the assessment framework and the panel’s own discipline-specific reference framework (with this framework, the panel specifies the minimum discipline-specific requirements it believes the programmes should satisfy), the panel assesses the various quality aspects and explains its judgement on each quality aspect in the final report. The panel likewise expresses this judgement on a 4-point scale: unsatisfactory, satisfactory, good and excellent per aspect. At the overarching theme-level (staff, quality assurance, …) the score is unsatisfactory or satisfactory.
It is a deliberate choice to assign the external quality assurance to the umbrella organisations of the institutions. VLUHR believes that strong ownership in the programmes for the external assessment process, clearly contributes to the positive approach of the programmes towards external evaluation and creates the necessary openness to discuss potential measures for quality improvement, a vision which is shared by the Flemish Government. Therefore external assessments are organised by the umbrella organisations of the higher education institutions. Another way to ensure this ownership is the fact that programmes which have to be evaluated are requested to propose members for the assessment panel. They make a list of preferred chair persons for the panel and a long list of potential qualified panel members. On the basis of this list, the panel chair composes the panel. This composition has to be agreed upon by the VLUHR Board, before the panel members are invited.
A main objective of the external quality assurance system is for the institutions to account for the quality they offer, an independent
judgement is an essential feature of the system. Strict conditions are in place to guarantee that the proposed panel members are independent. Additionally, the independence of the panel members is checked by the Higher Education Recognition Committee (a standing committee of independent experts which gives advice to the Flemish Government on all kinds of higher education matters) before the assessment process starts. Since 2004, accreditation has been added to the external quality assurance system. So, all bachelor’s and master’s programmes assessed by one of the two quality assurance agencies in Flanders have to demonstrate their generic quality as a condition for accreditation. The assessment panels’
judgements count heavily in this accreditation decision. Flanders and the Netherlands decided to have their higher education programmes jointly accredited, and to this end they established the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO)9. VLIR and VLHORA have developed a joint protocol for the assessment of higher education programmes, which describes the procedures for external assessments of higher education programmes, as well as the assessment framework. The assessment panels judge the programmes concerned on the basis of the six ‘themes’ (covering 21 ‘aspects’) listed in the accreditation framework10. The assessment framework envisages grasping every aspect of a programme, focussing not only on the curriculum and results, but also on goals, staff, facilities and internal quality assurance. After the publication of the assessment report, the higher education institutions have to submit an accreditation application to the NVAO. The NVAO’s decision-making is binary: either the programme receives accreditation or it does not.
If the accreditation decision about a programme is negative, the board of the programme may submit an application to the Flemish government for a temporary recognition. A positive accreditation decision has an eight-year period of validity.
9 www.nvao.net
10 NVAO, Accreditatiekader bestaande opleidingen hoger onderwijs Vlaanderen, September 1st 2009, http://www.nvao.net/accreditatiekaders-vlaanderen
PART 1 NATIONAL POLICIES AND QUALITY ASSURANCE FRAMEWORKS