Post-Accreditation Monitoring and Control

The idea behind the proposed policy’s is to work on the external quality control in the intermediate period between two accreditations of the Higher Education Institution (HEI). This work is targeted towards overcoming the HEI’s weaknesses found during the last performed accreditation procedure, as well as related to provision of clear and concrete evidences for positive tendencies and progress towards the quality of training, the attractiveness and strengthening the competitiveness of the HEI.

It is an example of good practice in that post-accreditation monitoring and control facilitates formal interaction between the NEAA and the HEIs that are targeted with overcoming weaknesses. It is done based on the partnership’s principle and clear rules for joint work. Introducing the post-accreditation monitoring and control enriches the NEAA’s functions with important and useful for the Bulgarian higher education activities, as post-accreditation monitoring and control onto: - implementation of the recommendations provided during the corresponding accreditation of the HEIs in the country; - development and functioning of the institutional quality assurance and quality control systems of the HEIs, which takes in account the students’ opinion too; - keeping the HEI’s capacity for training students (the maximum number of students that could be trained by the HEI in compliance with the assured quality of training, the academic staff, the training equipment and the educational area), determined during the accreditation of each HEI in the country.

Before the introduction of this policy, the HEIs had been obliged to obtain programme accreditation for each particular programme, which had to be designed in compliance with special state educational requirements provided for each specialty (already abolished). Now the programmes must be designed in compliance with the existed general state educational requirements for training students in each specialty at each educational and qualificational degree (abolished in 2002). Since introducing this new approach, the accreditation had been reduced to evaluation of the degree of compliance among each separated educational programme and the state educational requirements. Today, the programmes for acquisition of higher education at a given educational and qualificational degree are designed in compliance with the Ordinance on State Requirements for Acquisition of Higher Education at the educational and qualificational degrees of Bachelor, Master, and “Specialist in..”, adopted by Decree No 162 / 23 July 2002 (published, SG issue 76 / 06.08.2002, last supplemented, issue 79 / 05.09.2003). The “Specialist in..” degree has been recently replaced by “Professional Bachelor in..”, since last amendments and supplements of the Higher Education Act, published, SG issue 41 / 2007). NEAA is the specialized state body responsible for evaluation, accreditation and quality control of the HEIs’ activities and the scientific research institutions with respect to training specialists and improving their qualification, as well as to developing the science, the culture and the innovative activities.

TThe strategy undertaken involves a high frequency of interaction between the NEAA’s permanent commission on post-accreditation monitoring and control and the HEIs and their academic governing teams. The intensity of the post-accreditation monitoring and control towards HEIs with a low accreditation marks is higher, and visa versa – HEIs with higher accreditation marks interact with the Permanent Commission for post-accreditation monitoring and control more rarely. Additional arguments towards this direction are first, the fact that the post-accreditation monitoring and control unit already has in great degree administrative-professional capacity for successful execution of its activity, and second the principle of partnership with the HEIs.

So far in terms of action, the introduction and implementation of this new policy for the Bulgarian higher education policy of the NEAA is based on the following more important actions:

• Regulation of the post-accreditation monitoring and control activity by the Higher Education Act;
• Further development and concretization of the law statements in post-accreditation monitoring and control by the NEAA’s Rules of Procedure (completed task).
• Assuring step-by-step the administrative-professional capacity of the in post-accreditation monitoring and control unit at the NEAA (full completion of this task is forthcoming);
• Overall development and approval of all internal legislative base (rules, procedures, methodological requirements, etc.) for post-accreditation monitoring and control done by the NEAA’s Accreditation Council (completed and already published);
• Training of new type experts
• post-accreditation monitoring and control experts coming from the HEIs to be included in the expert groups in compliance with the approved rules and procedures;
• Research and use of foreign experience (mostly European one) and good practices in this field;
• Support of the HEIs in giving meaning of the accreditation recommendations and its concretization, as well as the actions needed for its successful implementation;
• Support in the development and control of the quality evaluation and control systems at institutional level with accent onto the evidence-base for its impact and usefulness;
• Control onto the observation of the educational capacity of the HEIs as a precondition for the HEI’s ability for quality assurance, quality support and development of qualitative education.
• Provision of proofs and suggestions for sanctions towards the HEIs, which have getting worst results with respect to the quality of training and to implementation of the recommendations from the accreditation procedure;
• Development of analytical reports on post-accreditation monitoring and control of the HEIs, in order current information for the decision making process of the NEAA’s Accreditation Council to be provided, and for better information provision and evidence-based provision of the next accreditation procedure.

1. Monitoring and evaluation by the Accreditation Council: Post-accreditation monitoring and control as one of the policies provided by the NEAA is subject to monitoring and evaluation performed by the Accreditation Council as well. It is accomplished by making proposals for discussion and approval of rules, procedures, working time-schedules, reports on post-accreditation monitoring and control of the HEIs with final marks, etc. 
2. Monitoring of the post-accreditation monitoring and control is performed also by the institutional quality assurance and control system of the NEAA. 
3. Permanent Commission on post-accreditation monitoring and control’s current activity is observed, assisted and controlled by the deputy head of the NEAA.
4. Determined control functions in operative plan are performed by the General Secretary of the NEAA.  NEAA is an institution to the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Bulgaria. From this point of view, the NEAA is an independent institution, but the post-accreditation and control activity enjoys good interaction with the Ministry of Education and Science. The Minister of Education and Science has control-evaluation functions with respect to the NEAA and is responsible for the NEAA in the field of education as well.

Post-accreditation monitoring and control policy in BG is new, and from this point of view its outcomes are in initial phase.  Strengths: principle of partnership and cooperation in the relations between the NEAA’s post-accreditation monitoring and control unit and the HEIs; mutual understanding for pursuing a common goal – higher quality of training and better competitiveness of the Bulgarian HEIs; accents onto outcomes and evidences instead of formal accounting of completion of given recommendations;   Weaknesses at this stage: insufficient resources (incl. financial resources and information-technical equipment) available for implementing the post-accreditation monitoring and control and need for better publicity of its activity among the stakeholders; need for strengthening the training of external experts in post-accreditation monitoring and control; need for enriched methodological requirements for the HEIs, especially with respect to the effect of the participation of the academic community as a whole in the actions towards continuous quality development in all dimensions; giving a meaning, development and implementation of more active tools for stimulation / sanctions for more justified evaluation of achievements / faults (as a serious decrease in the quality of training) of the HEIs.