University looking to overseas agency for quality assurance

A foreign agency may be recruited to carry out quality assurance at the University of Malta, as Europe moves towards setting common standards for higher education institutions under what is known as the Bologna Process.

Joseph Mifsud, head of the university's European Unit, said in an interview that towards this end the university was developing links with the quality assurance body that oversees Dutch and Flemish higher education institutions.

The university has its own, internal quality assurance committee. However, external quality assurance is required too, and Dr Mifsud said practically every country has a national agency that fulfils this role or is about to appoint one.

With its limited pool of academics, Malta would have difficulty in setting up an independent national agency. It had therefore asked to appoint an outside agency and this principle has now been accepted, he said.

In various joint declarations, the first of which was made after their 1999 Bologna meeting, European ministers responsible for higher education acknowledged that quality assurance systems are central to ensuring high standards and to making it easier to compare qualifications throughout Europe, another aim of the Bologna Process (see box).

In their last Bologna Process conference, held in Berlin last year, the ministers stressed the need to develop shared criteria and methodologies, although they emphasised that the prime responsibility for quality assurance lay with the institution itself, as an autonomous entity.

By next year, when the ministers meet again in Bergen, each national quality assurance system will have to be able to evaluate programmes and institutions, including the participation of students and the publication of results, and provide accreditation to the institutions.

Malta recently hosted an international conference on the Implications of the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy for Higher Education Institutions, organised by the European Unit and the embassy of The Netherlands, which holds the EU's rotating presidency.

Dr Mifsud is an elected member, until May 2005, of a small committee of people who oversee the work done in Europe between the two-yearly ministerial conferences.

His involvement in the international dimension of higher education gives him a bird's eye view of the situation in Europe. One trend he sees is that first degrees will eventually go the way of 'O' and 'A' levels, i.e. they will start to be viewed as just a certificate of competence enabling holders to proceed to a Masters degree, where they can develop the higher level of competence increasingly required to operate effectively in many jobs and fields. "That future is not too far away," he said.

The preparation of graduates for the labour market is one of the driving forces of the Bologna Process. This ties in with the EU's Lisbon Strategy, which seeks to make the European economy more competitive and dynamic on the world stage.

Another goal related to the Lisbon Agenda is to give employers across Europe a better idea of what students, of whatever nationality, have done to obtain their degrees. This would aid worker mobility.

By next year all graduates will be entitled to receive a Diploma Supplement, free of charge, in a major European language. Dr Mifsud explained that this will be a sort of elaborated transcript and a "euro passport" readable across Europe.

The problem, however, was that it would cost the University Lm50,000 a year to produce the supplements needed by its graduates, and this extra money would have to be provided by the government, Dr Mifsud added.

What is the Bologna Process?

In May 1998, four European education ministers, the French, German, UK and Italian, sat down together at Sorbonne University in Paris to discuss a matter of concern - the incompatibility of their different higher education systems. Students of one country were finding it hard to study or have their degrees recognised in another.

The result of that meeting was an agreement to gradually harmonise their systems, by creating a common framework of degrees, removing obstacles to mobility and improving the recognition of qualifications across Europe.

The following year, 29 European ministers of higher education met in Bologna and signed the Bologna Declaration, in which they stated their intention to adopt a system of comparable degrees with two main cycles (undergraduate and graduate), a common system of credits, as well as to promote mobility, cooperation in quality assurance and the European dimension in higher education.

This process of harmonisation has since been followed up in ministers' meetings in Prague in 2001 and Berlin in 2003, each setting priorities for the following two years. The next ministerial meeting will be held in Bergen next year.