Dr. Jim Murray:

The model of quality assurance that has been adopted across Europe for the past few decades is very much based on the idea that the provider has the primary responsibility for quality assurance. Otherwise, we would have very centralised systems with big bureaucracies that become atrophied over time. There are experiences of that. It is a very fine balance but what you have to do is build the quality culture. The trust side of this is interesting. Do people distrust our universities and the quality of their degrees? We are trying to build a culture of provider quality assurance across the entire tertiary system. That does not come overnight and there is a very intense engagement between QQI and further education providers and the ETBs. We are working with them very collaboratively to build up that quality culture. We do the same with private providers. We do not accredit the self-awarding bodies in higher education, such as the technological universities, the institutes of technology and the traditional universities. There are various levels of supervision from us that change over time as those providers build up the capacity and capability.

If we really think about having a very centralised system, we are talking about having an army of curriculum developers and assessors sitting in an office. The idea in tertiary education is to have responsible providers and a whole series of processes that build their capacity and capability to do this.

When things go wrong we do step in and we have all sorts of measures - I will not say punitive - that we can take for any lapses in quality assurance.