By Douglas Blackstock, ENQA President
“Turn out the lights, the party’s over
They say that all good things must end…”
Willie Nelson
First elected in Yerevan in 2019, my time as both a Board member and President (since April 2021) of ENQA ends at the General Assembly in Brussels in October 2025. It has been a bit more eventful than I had imagined it might be. ENQA has not been a quiet life!
The arrival of Covid-19 in early 2020, online members’ meetings until spring 2022, a change of Director at the end of 2021, effectively stepping in as acting director for six months, and the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 all threw up new experiences for me, the Board and our staff.
From the start, I knew I had several issues that I wanted to address as President, including increasing our capacity to:
- Support agencies in aligning with the ESG through the second iteration of the SEQA-ESG initiative, which is about to come to a close with several agencies now preparing for a review.
- Better communicate with our members on ENQA’s policy work across Europe. As the European Commission stepped up their commitment and investment in their higher education initiatives, we have been a constructive partner, and we contributed extensively to the working structures of the Bologna Follow-Up Group.
- To engage actively with our colleagues around the world. We maintained strong relations and learned from colleagues in Africa, ASEAN and the USA and built new relationships in Ibero-America and the Gulf. We have developed relationships with UNESCO and the OECD as well as ongoing work with the Council of Europe.
I will leave others to judge the extent of this success.
As a growing number of countries adopt the Global Convention on Recognition, transparent and credible quality assurance (QA) becomes increasingly important to maintaining trust and confidence in higher education qualifications.
Working towards alignment with the shared ESG is a political commitment made by Ministers of the European Higher Education Area, which underpins many other aspects of higher education. It supports recognition of degrees and study periods, which allow for mobility of students, staff and graduates; and fosters international cooperation between institutions and QA agencies.
But this unity of purpose does not mean uniformity of process. We have respect for the diversity of approaches to higher education, which emerge due to our different histories, cultures, and priorities. The QA standards need to be broad enough to support flexibility and innovation. The ESG is an enabling framework, which was never meant to be a constraint because we do not want identikit, or to put it another way, flat-packed degrees that look the same wherever they are delivered.
The next iteration of the ESG needs to allow for flexibility in a dynamically changing higher education system, and create a principles-based context to explore different approaches to QA and to ensure the continued added value of external QA, particularly in systems where institutions may have been through several cycles of review.
But there are current principles that must remain in the ESG including: the vital role of students; transparent public reporting; universities and agencies operating free from political interference; and a trust-based system built on periodic peer review by experts, including site visits to institutions.
My first engagement with ENQA was in 2003, at a seminar on the QA of agencies and where the ENQA President of the time first floated the idea of a register of agencies. The establishment of this register has been a crucial factor in building trust in external QA and ENQA is fully committed to its success. To foster confidence amongst the agencies in this system, the external evaluations and consequent decisions must be based on the standards of the ESG as written, not on interpretations of what we might like the ESG to be.
To maintain trust in our work as agencies we need to operate to the highest ethical standards in line with the ESG, whether we conduct our activities at home or in another country. In the next work period, ENQA has important project work to bolster the frameworks for robust quality assurance of transnational education (TNE) and creating a code of conduct for cross-border activities of agencies.
Both areas are of growing concern to bodies such as UNESCO and the OECD, and ENQA and our members have a responsibility to maintain our individual and collective reputations. In simple terms, students on TNE programmes must get better transparent guarantees that the education they are receiving is of an equivalent standard to that in the home country of the university awarding the degrees, and agencies operating abroad should operate to the same standard as in their home country.
Higher education institutions and agencies need to be able to operate independently but, as education is politically important, both need to be accountable to the public. However, we have seen trust in systems damaged in recent times through regular political intereference in agencies. There are too many agencies that are inhibited from passing a review because the national legislation restricts their independence and in my time in office we have seen Board members or Directors of agencies summarily removed. Ministers need to live up the commitments they have made in their declarations under the Bologna Process.
As we look ahead, ENQA is currently drafting principles for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in QA. I encourage all of our members to engage and think about the parameters of how AI can and should not be used in their own review activity. Digitalisation is rapidly changing learning, teaching and assessment in higher education institutions. Agencies need to upskill in this area and at the same time use their convening power to bring institutions together to share practice for quality enhancement. Likewise ENQA will do this for agencies.
So, my time as an elected leader of ENQA is ending. I have worked with so many talented Board members, ENQA staff and leaders of agencies, and met with ministers and government officials from across the EHEA and beyond. I am indebted to all of them as they have helped me learn, a lot. Thanks folks.
The second half of the verse from Willie Nelson above continues:
“Call it a night, the party’s over
And tomorrow starts the same old thing again.”
Good luck to my successor and to all involved in ENQA’s next chapter.