09.07.07
The creation of the European Higher Education Area is only three years away now and the battle lines over this main objective of the Bologna process are becoming clear...
Forget vague ideas about voluntary harmonization, the recent report from the Education Select Committee has revealed that the two key battle lines to watch for are credit transfer and quality assurance
Reviewing credit transfer
The way credit is transferred is so important because on this rests the viability of the UK’s one-year and integrated Master's progammes. The current de facto pan-European system is a legacy of the European Commission’s Erasmus programme, a system known as the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation scheme.
This scheme is based on hours studied rather than on learner outcomes (which is the UK’s preferred approach), and the UK government has pressed for, and secured, a review of the way it works. If the review doesn’t change things radically however, it would mean that the UK’s one-year and integrated Master's progammes would have too few hours to qualify, thereby pushing them outside the system and making them appear second-rate in the eyes of international students.
Quality assurance
The second area to watch for is quality assurance and the centralizing tendency of the European Commission. Many in the UK argue that the independence of universities rests on there being strong, national quality-assurance procedures. However, any weakness in the procedures of any of the 46 Bologna signatory countries could be interpreted as an opportunity for centralization. Although the Commission doesn’t own the Bologna process itself, it is a key player within it and provides some of the finances, resources and systems (such as the credit system) that Bologna relies on.
The leverage this gives the Commission means that, although it doesn’t have any legal authority to centralize, it does have the tools to achieve this in practice. This is something that many in the UK are still nervous about. As the head of the QAA put it to the Committee, ‘[by] using Bologna tools, like standards and guidelines, or the potential register [of national QA systems that were to have been approved by the Commission], the Commission wanted to pursue its own policy objectives.’