Standards & Guidelines: A Quality Assurance System based on Peer Reviews for the ENIC-NARIC Networks

The peer review concept with Standards & Guidelines for improving the recognition procedures of the ENIC-NARIC centers has been developed as a quality assurance instrument since 2012 for the ENIC-NARIC networks and is based on the criteria of the Lisbon Recognition Convention (LRC). Individual ENIC-NARIC centres can use it on a fully voluntary basis to review and improve their practices towards compliance with the LRC, in areas they themselves find most fitting.

The instrument consists of 6 Standards & Guidelines, and a protocol for conducting a self-evaluation (including SWOT) and an external peer review by two other ENIC-NARIC centres. The self-evaluation and a peer review have a formative approach focused on continuous improvement in areas chosen by the centre under review. An external peer review is recommended every 5 years or in case of major changes to the centre.

The “Standards & Guidelines” for the networks were developed over the last years by a large group of ENIC-NARICs and quality assurance experts, with co-funding from the European Commission (EARN, SQUARE, IMPACT, AR-NET, TST and TST2 projects). More than half of the ENIC-NARIC centers have already participated in these projects. An Overview of the Typology of ENIC-NARICs has been drafted in the SQUARE project and updated by the TST2 project to compare centres. The Standards & Guidelines were adopted by the centres of the ENIC-NARIC networks during their Annual Joint Meeting 2019 in Cologne.

A round of peer reviews took place in 2024 with the following centres involved:

In the last round in 2022, six peer reviews have been carried out on site based on the following carrousel:

 Initially, Ukraine was participating in the project, but unfortunately had to withdraw from this round.

For undertaking the self-evaluation and peer review, please use the following documents:

• Standards & Guidelines Protocol
• Overview of the Typology of ENIC-NARICs
• Report template self-evaluation (used by the centre under review)
• Report template (used by peer reviewing team)

For more information, contact Jenneke Lokhoff (jlokhoff@nuffic.nl)