On 18 March the E4 group (ENQA, ESU, EUA and EURASHE) together with EI, BUSINESSEUROPE and EQAR published a joint proposal for revised “Standards and Guidelines for quality assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG)”. 

The proposal comes from the need to improve the clarity, applicability, usefulness, and scope of existing standards and guidelines, as it was stated in 2012 Bucharest Communiqué, adopted by the Ministers responsible for higher education in the 47 countries of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA).  The revised framework for quality assurance should reflect the progress and developments in European higher education since 2005, when the current ESG were adopted by European Ministers. 

This proposal was preceded by a stock-taking project of the E4 Group – “Mapping the Implementation and Application of the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (MAP-ESG)”. The project resulted in a report on the application and implementation of the ESG (2012), which served as the basis for the proposed revision. 

The proposal will be discussed in April at the next Bologna Follow-Up Group meeting, and the revised version of the ESG is expected to be adopted at the Ministerial Conference in Yerevan in 2015. 

Official website of the ESG revision  Current ESG (in 12 languages)