On 17 November 2025, the Steering Committee responsible for revising the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) published the first complete draft of the ESG 2027. This endeavor follows the mandate set out in the Tirana Communiqué of May 2024, which launched the formal revision process. The updated version is expected to be approved by the Bologna Follow-up Group in late 2026 and adopted by Ministers at the EHEA Ministerial Conference in 2027. 

The consultation package includes the full draft text, an explanatory note, and the survey questionnaire. Stakeholders across the EHEA are invited to provide feedback exclusively via the dedicated online survey, open until 9 January 2026. The survey must be completed in a single session, but respondents may choose to comment on individual standards or entire sections, without the obligation to address every question.  

As this is a first draft,  the consultation will primarily focus on content and coverage. The Steering Committee will continue refining the coherence and wording of the text as it prepares the final version. Given ACA’s ongoing work on the field of internationalisation of higher education and recent exchanges on the topic of quality assurance and the ESG (see ACA Newsletter - Education Europe, October 2025), we draw attention to this consultation as a key moment for the higher education community to help shape the next iteration of the framework.