It does not have to be very expensive to develop a NQF, populate it with existing qualifications and put a small secretariat in place to ensure coordination among stakeholders. But it becomes more expensive if the NQF used as a reform tool, and you want to use the NQF to boost the image of qualifications in your country and abroad and you want to ensure that people holding a qualification that is part of the NQF, have a qualification of some value that is quality assured. The most expensive part once you start implementing a qualifications frameworks is quality assurance.
When the trust in qualifications needs to be boosted, you cannot rely on self-regulatory models of quality assurance in which everybody promises to do his best at their own discretion. You need to put some common arrangements in place. In our study ”Qualifications Frameworks from Concepts to Implementation” we showed e.g. that the difference in size of coordinating bodies with or without a quality assurance role was enormous. So if quality assurance is so expensive, do we know what arrangements are needed to be effective? It seems that we are massively pulled into the direction of quality assuring providers, but is this really the best guarantee for quality assuring qualifications? Well actually, it is not .
We should first ask ourselves what or better whose quality we are trying to assure. And this is where many systems go wrong. The outcome of a learning process is not an official piece of paper produced by an institution, but the skills of a person. Many systems aim at quality assuring the institutions that train rather than making sure that the recognition of the skills of a person are quality assured. The assumption is that good training institutions will produce successful students, but in quality assurance it is not about assumptions but about facts.
The confusion has reached a very high level. The EQF Recommendation refers to providers and makes reference to the EQAVET and ESG principle in annex III. However, the recent EQAVET evaluation has confirmed that EQAVET is not paying sufficient attention to the assessment, validation and certification processes. The ESG are slightly better because there are actually 5 references in them to qualifications, although they are often mentioning them in one phrase with the programmes.
Partner countries that want to quality assure their qualifications do well to look beyond the QA principles mentioned in the EQF. Systems for quality assurance should be effective and cost-efficient.
So how do we know a person deserves a qualification? There are four principles that can help us to establish an efficient system.
- You need qualification standards that state clearly when a person is considered competent,
- You need an assessment process that allows us to measure if the person is competent
- To ensure consistency you need a process to double-check independently whether the assessment has been made correctly.
- Finally you need a recognised authority that can delivers the qualification to the right person, so that everybody can acknowledge the value of the certificate.
The whole thing starts with standards that are expressed in learning outcomes and state clearly what knowledge, skills and competences need to be met. Behind all the existing certificates and diplomas that are being issued today, you can only find few standards that meet those conditions. Most standards still describe conditions that the institution who trains the person is expected to meet, but actually say nothing about the skills of the individual. We are in a process of moving from qualifications based on curricula (certificates issued after successfully completing a training programme) to qualifications determining assessment requirements.
The assessment that counts for the recognition of the skills needs to have a direct link to the qualification standards, and often those links are missing. There is still an obsession with testing knowledge through oral and written testing in education systems, but these are often not the valid instruments to see if someone is really competent. Assessment is often done by the people who train the individual. Do we have assessors who can properly assess the person in an objective way?
Processes to verify the results of assessment are in many cases reduced to administrative checks. Often internal verification systems are missing. Then if the certificate is issued by a recognised authority, how are data transferred safely so that only those who deserve the qualification will get the certificate, while others who have not been successful are not exposed?
Using the principles above, that are in line with the EQF definition of a qualification, but not with the QA annex, can we perhaps develop better standards for QA that are more effective and perhaps less costly than what has been proposed so far?
Let us have your reactions, so that we can start working on this together.
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