Commitment and Mentoring

Here at ANECA we start this new academic year with the excitement of a fresher arriving in University for the first time, combined with the experience and enthusiasm of a lecturer awarded a well-deserved professorship after many years’ work building a network of national and international contacts. One who has educated and made a lasting impression on the young people who will remember their smile and dedication and ethical values. One who has supervised enthusiastic PhD candidates who, perhaps now or perhaps later on, will follow their own similar path. One who, thanks to the consolidation of firm lines of research, has dedicated efforts to transfer knowledge to society; their knowledge, the little they believe they have, and thanks to which they enjoy a good reputation.

The young ANECA, recently turned twenty, is conscious that this consolidated position counts for much but is just the launchpad for driving forward and pursuing future goals.

The Agency takes a long-term view through the windows it has opened over the years. One for every challenge facing the Spanish higher education system; one for every stimulus that transcends borders. The basis is provided by the regulatory reforms underway, both those already implemented, such as decrees 822 and 640 of 2021, as well as those currently being debated, such as the future Organic Law on the Spanish University System.

The strength for our drive lies in our desire to generate trust in our higher education institutions across society, through quality assurance. This objective is shared with the institutions and public administrations and approached on the basis of co-responsibility.

We enjoy a solid higher education system. The system's maturity and the quality procedures, position us in the best of scenarios to tackle the integrated accreditation of each institution, based on the quality of their internal quality assurance system, of their system as a whole, the factors that will facilitate it, and not just the accreditation of the university’s centres but, above all, the achievement of the strategic goals that it establishes for itself.

The strength of ANECA's progress lies in the commitment with which we have developed all our assessment programmes, which we have aligned to promote synergies and provide an excellent public service, with tailored calendars and planning for each institution, with predefined timelines and a model that enables career progress for academics. 

We are committed to balanced models, models we review to ensure they are modern, innovative and thought-through and integrate theory and practice with the reality and encompassing digitalisation.

This academic year, we are launching training in microcredential format through our Aula ANECA initiative. We deliver training for an assessment that encompasses a gender perspective. We are also making progress in terms of the sustainability of all our actions. We are launching a pilot project for comprehensive institutional accreditation, another pilot project for the quality assurance of partnerships between European universities, European degrees and microcredentials. Together with IESALC-UNESCO, we will begin the promotion of quality at Ibero-American institutions through the AECID Intercoonecta programme. We will also undertake the work we have committed to through a European project to review Engineering in Europe with a new approach.

There is a promising path that all of us that make up ANECA have committed to: those of us who work here, and the more than two thousand five hundred in Spain and Ibero-America who make assessment and quality accreditation possible. It is a path that invites is all to take in good company. And this company, as you know, is what ANECA provides through mentoring.

Mercedes Siles Molina
Director, ANECA