ENQA seminar on “Internal QA-systems and the ESG

ENQA and the ENQA Internal Quality Assurance Group organised a seminar on Internal QA-systems and the ESG. The seminar was hosted by AQU Catalunya.

Experiences of cooperation among the staff members of several European quality assurance agencies have made evident the considerable potential for mutual learning and inspiration among the agencies as regards relevant ways to organise and run their internal quality assurance (IQA) systems.

Based on these experiences, a meeting between the staff members of the ENQA member agencies engaged in the implementation of the internal quality assurance systems in their respective agencies was held at EVA’s premises in Copenhagen on April 17, 2007. Representatives of 20 quality assurance agencies were present at this founding meeting of the ENQA IQA group. The IQA group operates under the aegis of ENQA.

The purpose of the IQA group is, firstly, to strive towards ensuring lean, effective and development-oriented IQA systems, mutual inspiration, capacity building in terms of IQA, sharing of experiences and good practices and, secondly, to ensure the implementation of the ESG by the agencies. At the founding meeting it was agreed that these meetings of the IQA group would be organised on a yearly basis. The seminar “Internal QA-systems and the ESG” constituted the first annual meeting and was open to all ENQA Full and Candidate members, Associates and Affiliates.

The seminar was intended for agencies with operational internal quality assurance systems, and for agencies that had already started to implement such a system. The European standard (and ENQA membership criteria) on accountability procedures was extensively discussed.

Goals and Objectives
The purpose of the seminar was threefold:

• to learn more about strengths and weaknesses of the IQA-systems implemented in different agencies (ISO, EFQM, combination of both etc.).
• to clarify what the European standard on accountability procedures means for the IQA of quality assurance agencies;
• to reflect on possible improvements of the accountability procedures’ standard in order to be more in line with the day-to-day quality assurance practises at the agency level.

During the plenary sessions and parallel workshops of the seminar, the persons responsible for IQA in their agencies shared experiences on the daily implementation of IQA in their agencies.

PROGRAMME
The seminar programme can be found here.