ANECA participates in the General Assembly of ENQA 2025 in Brussels

From October 22 to 24, the General Assembly 2025 of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) took place in Brussels. This conference brought together representatives of quality agencies, academic institutions and experts from the education sector from all over Europe.

This year's event was of a special nature as it coincided with the celebration of ENQA's 25th anniversary, consolidating its role as a benchmark in the promotion of quality standards in higher education.

The Brussels meeting was jointly organized by the Flemish Council for Higher Education - Quality Assurance (VLUHR QA) and the Belgian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (AEQES), which gave a detailed presentation of the Belgian education system, highlighting its particularities and progress in institutional evaluation.

During the conference, key issues for the future of quality assurance were discussed. After the opening and welcome to the meeting, the first plenary session addressed the topic of Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) in the global context. The session discussed how the ESG and the work of ENQA have been used as European benchmarks for reliable quality assurance in this global context. A discussion was opened on the value of inter-regional dialogue and lessons that could be taken into account in the European context.

Also, in comparison with these ESGs, the perspective of the key quality assurance benchmarks of the regional systems of Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America was shared. Precisely, in this last case, the President of the Ibero-American System for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (SIACES) presented in his speech several of the results of the project ‘ESG-PBP Alignment’, a bi-regional initiative ENQA-SIACES coordinated by ANECA, whose objectives have been, firstly, to know the level of concordance-discordance between the ESG and the SIACES Principles of Good Practice (PBP), in order to lay a solid foundation on which to take steps towards a mutual understanding of quality assurance and, secondly, to establish a joint proposal for the alignment of the ESG and the PBP with a view to their potential future mutual recognition.