ENQA workshop: After the Bergen Ministerial meeting – results and stocktaking on subsidiarity and convergence

ENQA member agency Comité National d’Évaluation hosted a ENQA workshop on the implications to QA of the Bergen meeting of the European Ministers of Education.

More specifically, the implications for national quality assurance systems of the Bergen communiqué were analysed through group work and presentation of national cases. Another issue under discussion in the workshop was how to implement in practise the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) adopted by the Bergen communiqué. Also, the possibilities of convergence of national QA systems were addressed.

During the workshop many important questions were raised and recommendations made for the future work of ENQA, including the following:

• fulfilling the Standards and Guidelines for QA agencies will be an important challenge;
• the external reviews of ENQA member agencies will require a considerable amount of work in the forthcoming years;
  there is a need for convergence and clarification in the QA terminology;
• promoting the recommendations included in the Bergen communiqué at the national level will be a challenge for the QA agencies in a situation where the responsibility-sharing between the agencies, institutions and governments is not always clear;
• the mutual, cross-border recognition of agencies may not guarantee the institutional or ministerial acceptance as such;
  the link between the QA and qualifications framework will be an important challenge for ENQA;
• further convergence of national QA systems could be achieved by exploring possibilities for a unified evaluation report supplement.

A workshop report, containing all the major topics, recommendations and conclusions of the workshop, will be published by ENQA in the autumn 2005.

THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENTS ARE AVAILABLE:

Workshop plan
Workshop programme
List of Participants