International Quality Assurance Exchange at UKÄ

This week, UKÄ’s Department of Quality Assurance is gathering its European counterparts for Staff Week 2025 – a recurring project for international exchange of experience in quality assurance of higher education. Twelve participants from seven European countries have been invited to UKÄ to network and share experiences on the overarching theme of quality assurance issues.

Project Manager: Sebastian Steele, UKÄ

During the four days at UKÄ, there will be time for presentations, workshops, and getting to know each other. Each quality assurance organisation will present its challenges, and working methodology, as well as discuss relevant quality assurance approaches for external quality assurance. From UKÄ’s side, there is great interest in presenting the broader methodological development process that our quality assurance system has undergone in recent years. The hope now is to gain further ideas and perspectives that can help improve our method.

“We have been very good at looking inward, at what we can do in a Swedish context. But I would argue that we can learn a great deal from other organisations. Whether it’s a country that works more with control, or a country that places even more emphasis on trust than we do,” says Sebastian Steele, project manager for Staff Week 2025.

Presentation on the revision of the ESG

Also included in the programme is an external guest, Eva Jaroszewski, who works at AEQES (Belgium’s counterpart to UKÄ) and is part of ENQA’s working group on the revision of ESG. Eva J. will participate online to give a presentation on the revision of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG). ESG is the document that ties together the European Higher Education Area. The current ESG dates from 2015, and with its upcoming revision, UKÄ looks forward to contributing to this important work.

From idea to recurring meeting place

The idea of Staff Week was born in January 2023 when NVAO, the Dutch counterpart of UKÄ’s evaluation department, invited several European quality assurance organisations to restart collaboration after the standstill caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and to work together on quality assurance in higher education. Representatives from UKÄ’s evaluation department took part in that event and were so inspired by NVAO’s Staff Week that they organised Staff Week 2023 at UKÄ later the same year. Now, two years later, it is once again time, with twelve participants coming from Lithuania, Georgia, Slovakia, Moldova, France, the Netherlands, and Ukraine.

“If there is something in particular to highlight, it will be fascinating to hear Ukraine’s presentation on how they conduct quality assurance during a crisis. During war. Their operations are still ongoing,” says Sebastian Steele.

Staff Week 2025 is organised by UKÄ’s Department of Quality Assurance. The project manager is Sebastian Steele, with Gustaf Westin, Anna Lundberg, Ulf Hedbjörk and Annika Calgheborn as members of the working group, along with Maya Wikse as Head of group of internationalisation.