The European Standards and Guidelines
The European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG) were developed by the E4 Group. Comprising the European representative bodies of quality assurance agencies (ENQA), students (ESU), universities (EUA) and other higher education institutions (EURASHE), the E4 Group gathers the key stakeholders of quality assurance in higher education.
In 2003 the Ministers responsible for Higher Education in the Bologna signatory states asked ENQA to develop, in cooperation with ESU (then ESIB), EUA and EURASHE, "an agreed set of standards, procedures and guidelines" (Berlin Communiqué). Following this mandate the E4 Group developed the ESG during the two years to come as a common European set of principles and reference points for quality assurance of higher education. In 2005, the ESG were adopted by the Bologna Process ministerial summit in Bergen (Norway).
Translations
The ESG were developed and adopted in English. ENQA gathered on its website references to some (unofficial) translations of the ESG into eight (as of 7/5/08) further European languages. It should, however, be noted that for the purpose of inclusion on the register only the English original version of the ESG shall be relevant.
English version [PDF]
Background
The following paragraphs, that are part of the full report [PDF] presented to the ministers in Bergen, outline the background of the ESG and the approach to quality assurance they reflect:
[...] The standards and guidelines are designed to be applicable to all higher education institutions and quality assurance agencies in Europe, irrespective of their structure, function and size, and the national system in which they are located. As mentioned earlier, it has not been considered appropriate to include detailed "procedures" in the recommendations of this chapter of the report, since institutional and agency procedures are an important part of their autonomy. It will be for the institutions and agencies themselves, co-operating within their individual contexts, to decide the procedural consequences of adopting the standards contained in this report.As their starting point, the standards and guidelines endorse the spirit of the July 2003 Graz Declaration of the European University Association (EUA) which states that "the purpose of a European dimension to quality assurance is to promote mutual trust and improve transparency while respecting the diversity of national contexts and subject areas". Consonant with the Graz declaration, the standards and guidelines contained in this report recognise the primacy of national systems of higher education, the importance of institutional and agency autonomy within those national systems, and the particular requirements of different academic subjects. In addition, the standards and guidelines owe much to the experience gained during the ENQA-coordinated pilot project "Transnational European Evaluation Project" (TEEP), which investigated, in three disciplines, the operational implications of a European transnational quality evaluation process.
The standards and guidelines also take into account the quality convergence study published by ENQA in March 2005, which examined the reasons for differences between different national approaches to external quality assurance and constraints on their convergence. Further, they reflect the statement of Ministers in the Berlin communiqué that "consistent with the principle of institutional autonomy, the primary responsibility for quality assurance in higher education lies with each institution itself and this provides the basis for real accountability of the academic system within the national quality framework". In these standards and guidelines, therefore, an appropriate balance has been sought between the creation and development of internal quality cultures, and the role which external quality assurance procedures may play.
In addition, the standards and guidelines have also benefited particularly from the "Code of Good Practice" published in December 2004 by the European Consortium for Accreditation (ECA) and other perspectives included in ESIB's "Statement on agreed set of standards, procedures and guidelines at a European level" (April 2004) and "Statement on peer review of quality assurance and accreditation agencies" (April 2004), EUA's "QA policy position in the context of the Berlin Communiqué" (April 2004) and the EURASHE "Policy Statement on the Bologna Process" (June 2004). Finally, an international perspective has been included by comparing the standards on external quality assurance with the "Guidelines for good practice" being implemented by the international network INQAAHE.
(Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area, 2005, p. 11f)
