Research On The System Of Quality Assurance For Higher Education In UK

The quality and academic level of higher education directly restricts a country's promotion of comprehensive strengths and the influence in the international society. Therefore, all countries are carrying on reforms to higher education, transferring from paying attention to scale development to focusing on quality assurance, by increasing fund investment and standardizing the evaluation system, to safeguard and enhance the quality and academic level of higher education.Along with the development of higher education, UK has formed a system of quality and academic standards assurance, which combines the systems inside and outside universities. As an exterior organization of quality assurance for higher education, Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) treats guaranteeing the standards of English higher education and improving its quality as its only missions. It has formulated Academic Infrastructure for English higher education which consists of four components:Frameworks for higher education qualifications, Subject benchmark statements, Programme specifications, and the Code of practice for the assurance of academic quality and standards in higher education. As one of the most important parts of Academic Infrastructure, the Code of Practice owns four main characteristics as authority, openness, systematicness and flexibility. It provides universities with guiding principles and operating methods on how to manage education quality, and it is also an important basis on which QAA implements its institutional audit, thus the code of practice makes all the work and activities of QAA impartial, fair, and open to the public.Nowadays, China's higher education is experiencing the transformation from the elite education stage to the mass education stage, so the problem how to ensure the quality of higher education is becoming more and more serious day by day. According to the facts of development in higher education, China may learn the beneficial experience from the quality assurance system of English higher education, to make the present system of evaluating and safeguarding higher education perfect. It requires that we should integrate the existing evaluation organizations and establish an independent organization of higher education quality safeguard and evaluation; we should formulate a set of scientific, reasonable and feasible academic standards for higher education; we should carry out higher education quality evaluation and safeguard according to relevant laws and try to make its process impartial, fair, and open to the public; and we should establish a system of higher education quality evaluation and assurance which unifies the university interior quality self-safeguard system and exterior quality assurance and evaluation system arouse universities' enthusiasm and initiative in maintaining their own education quality and academic standards.