Quality Assurance Agency For Higher Education
The stated misson of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) is to 'safeguard standards and improve the quality of UK higher education'. Established in 1997 through the transfer of functions and staff from the former Higher Education Quality Council and the quality assessment divisions of HEFCE and HEFCW, this independent agency works to ensure that higher education qualifications in the United Kingdom (UK) are of a sound standard. It protects the public interest by checking how universities and colleges maintain their academic standards and quality. This work is supported by a range of guidance developed in cooperation with the higher education sector, principal among which is the UK Quality Code for Higher Education (the Quality Code).
QAA is the body entrusted with advising the Privy Council on which institutions should be granted degree awarding powers and the right to be called a university. Since 2011 QAA has been designated by the UK Border Agency (UKBA) to conduct educational oversight of higher education providers, to enable them to apply for 'highly trusted sponsor' status under UKBA Tier 4 regulations. Providers having, or acquiring, this status are entitled to recruit overseas students into the UK.
QAA also regulates the Access to Higher Education Diploma, a qualification that enables individuals without A-levels or the usual equivalent to enter higher education. It does this by monitoring the Access Validating Agencies that award the Diploma.
QAA's mission to safeguard standards and improve quality is supported by four strategic aims, which may be summarised as follows: to address the needs of students and be valued by them; to safeguard standards in an increasingly diverse sector; to drive improvements; and to improve public understanding of UK higher education.
Read more about Quality Assurance Agency For Higher Education: Structure and Funding, History
Famous quotes containing the words quality, assurance, agency, higher and/or education:
“The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Whoever can discern truth has received his commission from a higher source than the chiefest justice in the world who can discern only law. He finds himself constituted judge of the judge. Strange that it should be necessary to state such simple truths!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Since [Rousseau’s] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)