Quality Assurance and Accreditation
Quality assurance in higher education and TAFE relates not only to internal processes for evaluating and ensuring quality. It also concerns state and federal mechanisms designed to regulate the provision of tertiary education, and the extent to which those mechanisms protect the quality of provision across the board. Increasingly, quality assurance mechanisms are being developed in response to the deregulation of tertiary education provision, as a source of information and protection for `clients’.
For staff, quality assurance has professional and industrial implications – for example, in terms of the use of performance indicators and performance management strategies, and the implications for workloads arising from QA policies and practices.
NTEU’s work in this area includes
- Intervening in debates and legislative change regarding quality assurance mechanisms at institutional, state and federal level, so as to ensure that the professional and industrial interests of staff are central to such deliberations;
- Developing policies and enterpriuse bargaining strategies that support this work;
- Liaising with other organisations such as the Australian Qualifications Framework secretariat, the Australian Universities Quality Agency.
Further information:
| AQF | Australian Qualifications Framework – information about Quality Assurance in TAFE and higher education |
| Australian Universities Quality Agency | Information and documents on the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) |
| DEST Documents | DEST publications on quality |
| MCEETYA Protocols | National protocols for higher education approval processes |
| NTEU Documents | NTEU papers and submissions on Quality Assurance and Accreditation |