By Peter Brandstrup, Director for Communication and Public Relations at NOKUT (Norway), and Alfonso Hernández Roldán, Head of External Relations at ANECA (Spain)
On 4-5 June 2026, ENQA organised a workshop on Strategic Communications in Quality Assurance Agencies, hosted by the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education (NOKUT, Norway). The event gathered European quality assurance professionals to explore how strategic communications can strengthen trust, transparency, stakeholder engagement, and institutional reputation management. The workshop built on discussions from the 2026 ENQA Member’s Forum, which explored the theme “Strengthening trust in an evolving higher education landscape”.
Trust and transparency, together with responsibility and reputation, were the main topics of the workshop’s first day, in which the attendees participated in a fishbowl discussion, sharing concerns and offering insights into communication at their agencies—including priorities, resources, messages, and key elements for building trust—with a particular focus on the role that digital tools and artificial intelligence can play in strategic communication.
During the second day, the ENQA workshop addressed this topic through a working session aimed at identifying best practices regarding the dimensions and purpose of communication and stakeholder groups. The final session of the workshop pointed to a set of common principles for how agencies can work more strategically with communication. A shared point was the need to link communication more closely to organisational goals, and to treat it as an integrated part of all core activities rather than a separate function. Throughout the workshop, there was also strong emphasis on the need to prioritise communication efforts in line with available resources, and to make deliberate choices about what to focus on and how.
Discussions in Oslo also highlighted the importance of transparency and making visible how quality assurance outcomes and decisions are reached. Communicating the value and purpose of quality assurance to society is also essential at a time when this cannot be taken for granted. This requires a deliberate and systematic approach to communication. The premises, standards and professional judgements that are part of our work need to be presented in ways that make sense to different stakeholders. This helps stakeholders understand both our conclusions and their practical implications. When the processes behind decisions become clearer, it also becomes easier to relate to them, whether one agrees with the conclusion or not.
Another important aspect that was highlighted is the need to be clear about our role and responsibility. Many quality assurance agencies exercise authority, and how that authority is used shapes how we are perceived. The way we communicate is part of this: it influences expectations, frames decisions and helps consolidate our role.
This is closely linked to how we engage with the sector and our stakeholders—institutions, students, authorities and society as a whole. This requires us to be clear, consistent and present in the dialogue. In this sense, a recurring point was that communication needs to be treated as a two-way process, where feedback from stakeholders is actively sought and used.
Looking back on the workshop, one message stood out in particular: communication is about making clear what we do, why we do it and what it means. When communication is consistently aligned with practice, it strengthens trust and legitimacy over time.