ESG-PBP Alignment project: bi-regional commitment to strengthen mutual trust in quality assurance in higher education

As a result of the common will of the European region and the Ibero-American region to establish ties of friendship and cooperation, to build a common understanding that contributes to mutual trust and to strengthen their good practices in quality assurance in higher education, and to reinforce and broaden the collaboration and exchange of experiences in this field in their respective regions, the  Memorandum of Understanding between Sistema Iberoamericano de aseguramiento de la calidad de la educación superior (SIACES) and the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA).

The importance of this milestone, which represents an additional step forward in terms of the will for collaboration and understanding in this area reiterated over the last two decades by both regions, is recognised in the Declaration of the II EU-CELAC Academic and Knowledge Summit in 2023. 

Through this Memorandum of Understanding, ENQA and SIACES agree, on the one hand, to actively seek opportunities for cooperation with the aim of strengthening trans-regional skills in order to ensure the quality and improvement of higher education, and, on the other hand, to cooperate for the development and implementation of joint projects, activities, events and other forms of collaboration in the areas of information exchange, training and mutual understanding.

It is in the last of these three areas where the mutual commitment to promote knowledge between the parties of the approaches, methodologies and systems of quality assurance and improvement of higher education used and applied by each of them, as well as of the most relevant aspects related to the quality of higher education and the harmonisation of criteria and guidelines, good practices and procedures adopted in both regions is explicitly determined.

The present project 'Alignment of SIACES-ENQA quality guidelines in higher education for strengthening bi-regional trust' (ESG-PBP Alignment) aims precisely to take steps in the development of this area. The overall objective of the project is to strengthen mutual trust to ensure and improve the quality of higher education between Europe and Ibero-America by discussing their fundamental reference guidelines for future alignment, i.e., in the case of the European Higher Education Area, the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in European Higher Education (ESG), and in the case of the Ibero-American Knowledge Area, the Principles of Good Practice (PBP) in quality assurance systems.

Taking all of the above into account, the aim is to achieve the aforementioned general objective of this project by working on two specific objectives:

1. To find out the level of concordance-discordance between the ESG and the PBPs, in order to lay a solid foundation on which to take steps towards a mutual understanding of quality assurance.
2.    Establish a joint proposal for the alignment of the ESG and the PBPs for mutual recognition.

To achieve these objectives, this project, which will run from February 2024 to the first half of 2025, has a working group composed of both the ENQA Secretariat and the SIACES Secretariat, as well as a group of international reference quality agencies such as A3ES (from Portugal), ANVUR (from Italy), CNA-Chile (from Chile), CNA-Colombia (from Colombia), CONEAU (from Argentina), HCERES (from France), QAA (from the United Kingdom) and ANECA (from Spain), which is responsible for the coordination of the project.

At the end of this project, if considered by ENQA and SIACES, it is expected that its results will be made available to the entities in charge of reviewing and updating the ESG and the PBP in the near future, so that they can be taken into account in the next official processes of revision and updating of such key documents at international level for quality assurance in higher education.