A new project coordinated by EP Nuffic - on request of the Dutch Ministry of Higher Education - will work together with the ENIC-NARICs network, Ministries of Education and 23 other educational institutions from Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain in order to gain experience at national and European level with the implementation of automatic recognition and recommendations. The project, callled ‘Focus on Institutional Automatic Recognition’ (FAIR), was awarded at the end of 2014 with a co-founding of the European Commission within the framework of the Erasmus + Key Activity 3 (Policy Experimentation ). Building on the previous work of the Pathfinder Group on Automatic Recognition, the new project team will attempt to determine the impact of automatic recognition by undertaking two assessments of recognition procedures based on predefined indicators – before and after having introduced elements of automatic recognition. 

The results will be used for (inter)national recommendations and implementation activities. To ensure an objective outcome, the trials will be followed by the European University Association (EUA) as ‘evaluation body’. The European Consortium for Accreditation (ECA) will have also have a role in quality assurance.  FAIR is for the participating institutions also an opportunity to present and share their recognition procedures in preparation for the new standards in the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG), which will probably be adopted in Yerevan the upcoming Spring. The document states that recognition procedures must be included in the internal and external quality dimensions of institutions.