Self-assessment is arguably the most powerful means to understand and improve its educational performance.
The following proposal to start activities for better quality within your VET organisation aims at reviewing and adapting the PDCA cycle to your own staff. While the PDCA cycle starts with planning activities, which logically is obvious, the proposal here is to start with an assessment phase, since tackling specific problems and finding solutions for them is more likely to attract people’s attention and stimulate their engagement.
EQAVET recommendation
The EQAVET recommendation suggests NRPs in Member States ‘support self-evaluation as a complementary and effective means of quality assurance’.
Another equally important proposal is to promote communication and create awareness among teachers, trainers and other stakeholders of existence of critical aspects within the organisation, thus generating and stimulating the need for change and improvement.
Self-assessment
Self-assessment is to ensure that your VET organisation identifies its strengths and areas for improvement, derives from this an improvement plan and develops and implements specific activities, thereby increasing its quality.
There is no single approach to self-assessment, which could be applied successfully to every institution. The most formal systems for external accreditation provide guidelines for self-assessment and in several European Member States not only is it a legal obligation for VET institutions to undertake self-assessment regularly, but national authorities also provide guidelines and criteria on how to do it.
The final aim of self-assessment is to develop a long-term QMS and a sustainable culture of quality in your VET institution. Repeating selfassessment again and again allows you to measure continuously progress you have made, compare current with previous performance and provide for consistent quality development.
Self-assessment allows you to pursue various objectives, but its effects should not be exaggerated. The two foremost objectives should be to promote awareness of problems, deficits, etc., and internal communication and views exchange on what should be done. Initiation of change and improvement can be expected only as a result of this process.
Before starting self-assessment three preconditions must be met, otherwise the process will not make any sense:
(a) the senior management team must support and direct the project with inner conviction and personal engagement;
(b) resources for carrying out the process must be justified and available;
(c) resources to implement improvements must be earmarked.
A four-phase process is recommended for implementation of a first selfassessment passage, which should later be repeated in appropriate cycles. Starting your activities to improve quality. The four-phase self-assessment process is implemented through the following series :
You can generate and gather a large amount of data. Analysing and making sense of this data enables better decision-making.
Source: http://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/publications-and-resources/publications/...
We recommend Judit Lannert education researcher's lecture to everyone because it gives a perfect overview of the topic. If you want to analyze the quality of education, its levels and "actors" if you want to know more about the Research and research results, it is important to follow this lecture.
The conclusions of the presentation: there are several factors effecting the performance of the performance of the school, of the students: the size of the classes, the quality of school management, spending per students, etc. BUT the most significant factor the le is the quality of teaching staff.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication [communication] reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Back to the top