By Cristina Ghitulica, President, ENQA
In 2025, ENQA has celebrated 25 years since its establishment. The General Assembly and anniversary event in Brussels in October provided an important opportunity for the ENQA community, past and present, to celebrate our achievements and look to the future. I am particularly grateful to our members and affiliates who took the time to record video messages to mark the occasion, showing both creativity and their appreciation for ENQA. These also demonstrate the multifaceted role that ENQA plays in the European quality assurance community.
There has been much reflection on how ENQA’s history is intertwined with the development of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Quality assurance is a key commitment of the Bologna Process, and ENQA’s status as a consultative member of the Bologna Follow-up Group defines its unique function in shaping policies in quality assurance in the EHEA. Quality assurance was acknowledged as being “one of the most significant features and drivers of change in the EHEA”, and for sure we would not be wrong to say that ENQA has played an important role in that.
While ENQA’s most well-known contribution relates to the development of the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), its impact extends far beyond that. It has a duty to support the meaningful implementation of the standards across Europe, to promote their understanding and integrity. This is the only way to achieve real impact, beyond formal compliance.
Twenty years after the publication of the first version, we might expect that full implementation of the ESG across the EHEA should now be achieved. However, we see that in some contexts this implementation must be strengthened or still achieved. ENQA has a crucial role to play in supporting progress towards this goal, including by engaging with national authorities when and where needed.
As part of our membership application process, the ENQA Board takes decisions on the compliance with the ESG following an external peer-review process, just as the Bologna commitment states. ENQA’s review process is a central part of our activities, of which we are particularly proud. This year ENQA has also worked to follow up on the recommendations of the external review of its Agency Review service. This was an important exercise for transparency and the improvement of the Agency Reviews, ensuring that ENQA is held to the same high standards expected of quality assurance agencies in the EHEA.
Adherence to common principles and standards should not prevent innovation. We hear voices arguing that external quality assurance stands in the way of change and progress in higher education, and that it can be an obstacle for developing, for example, joint education provision. ENQA and quality assurance agencies need to adapt to this reality — the need for rapid reaction and flexibility — but also to explain better the role of quality assurance and underline that faster is not always better and that international collaboration is meaningful only when it leads to increased quality of education.
Developments at the European Union level in terms of quality assurance, such as the proposal for a joint European degree or degree label, demand from ENQA firm and informed positions as well as support, to make sure that this initiative is successful and attains the objectives set for it, and is not adding more burden to the work of agencies or institutions.
The General Assembly in Brussels set the stage for the next stage of ENQA’s development, particularly with the approval of a new strategic plan for the next five years, which will guide our work around core goals of sustaining a community of agencies that fosters innovation and collaboration, promoting the EHEA commitments and tools, and representing the voice of agencies in policy-making. The recently adopted Statute and Rules of Procedures ensure an improved framework for the functioning of the association, towards achieving its strategic goals.
We at ENQA have a responsibility to represent each of our members’ interests, while pursuing our shared goal to foster high-quality education in Europe for the benefit of our students and of our societies. It is a great honour to have been elected ENQA President in October, and I consider it a huge responsibility. I am deeply committed to ENQA and its role in shaping the European quality assurance and higher education systems and look forward to leading ENQA in that work in 2026. In the meantime, I wish the ENQA community happy holidays and every achievement in the year to come, both personally and professionally.