Focus on Quality: External Evaluation in Pre-Tertiary education
Within the project Enhancements in the quality of education and training in SEE – EQET SEE, financed by the Austrian Development Agency with funds from Austrian Development Cooperation, and implemented by the ERI SEE Secretariat and partners from the seven economies: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo*, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia and strategic partners ETF and SICI, a number of activities contributing to improvement of quality assurance systems in pre-tertiary education in the region was conducted throughout the 2022.
After the project was officially kicked off in February, the Policy vision meetings were organized in March and April in Serbia and Montenegro, for exploration of the role of external evaluation of institutions and approaches to continuously improve quality, efficiency and effectiveness of the external evaluation processes and reaching the shared vision on external evaluation purpose and goals. This vision has served to steer further activities of the project. In April, the Training on data management and evidence-informed policy making was organized in Montenegro with goals of enhancing the process of data collection, analysis and use in the external evaluation process and facilitating experience exchange between policy makers and quality assurance experts from the South Eastern Europe economies and Moldova. It was followed by the Meeting for the development of a regional standard of competences for external evaluators in pre-tertiary education in May in Montenegro and national meetings in all seven economies during summer. Based on the developed Policy vision and Regional competence standard, Training Needs Analysis Questionnaire was elaborated and adopted on the Workshop for the Training Needs Analysis Questionnaire held in October in Albania. The end of the year saw the beginning of work on analysis of quality assurance methodologies during preparatory meeting, held online in December.
It is expected that these efforts will lead to more effective, cost efficient and cooperative quality assurance processes in the region, supported by the increased capacities of quality agencies and external evaluators as well as enhanced quality culture at national level, supported by higher level of evidence-based policy making and partnership relationships between the actors in the process.
