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 quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“There is no assurance of the great fact in question [namely, immortality]. All the arguments are mere probabilities, analogies, fancies, whims. We believe, or disbelieve, or are in doubt according to our own make-up—to accidents, to education, to environment. For myself, I do not reach either faith or belief ... that I—the conscious person talking to you—will meet you in the world beyond—you being yourself a conscious person—the same person now reading what I say.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“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)
“Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)