Support for quality management
FINEEC supports early childhood education and care providers, education and training providers and higher education institutions in matters concerning evaluation and quality management Quality management refers to the practices, processes or systems used by the educational organisation to plan, implement, monitor and develop the quality of its operation. Quality management can be understood as a general concept that includes quality assurance, development, management and steering. Self-assessment is part of quality management.
FINEEC produces a national overview of quality management at the education system level. FINEEC’s task “to support providers of early childhood education and care, education and training as well as higher education institutions in matters related to evaluation and quality management” is stipulated in the Act on the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre (1295/2013). The objective of supporting education providers’ quality management and conducting external evaluations of quality systems is to enhance the functioning of the Finnish education system, support the development of education, and promote equality for learners.
FINEEC’S support for quality management is based on enhancement-led evaluation. Enhancement-led evaluation stresses participation, trust between the evaluator and participants in the evaluation, and the education and training providers’ and higher education institutions’ responsibility for maintaining and improving the quality of their activities.
FINEEC supports education providers in the development of quality management in the following ways:
- by producing evaluation data for the needs of quality development
- by evaluating organisers’ quality management systems
- by producing information on quality management and development practices and by spreading them across the boundaries of different levels of education.
- by supporting early childhood education and care providers, schools, educational institutions and higher education institutions in taking advantage of national evaluations and self-assessments and in strengthening the perspective of enhancement-led evaluation.
- by supporting quality management, steering, development and assurance.
- by developing evaluation systems, support material and evaluation tools
- by offering training and guidance concerning quality management and evaluation
FINEEC’s evaluation and quality management concepts
Quality management is at different stages between education sectors – the need for support also varies
The quality management of Finnish education as an activity extends from early childhood education and care to higher education. Quality management and quality management evaluation are at different stages in different education sectors, even though the legislation on education providers’ and higher education institutions’ self-evaluations is mainly based on the same principles. Under legislation applicable to them, education providers and higher education institutions have also an obligation to publish the key results related to quality management and evaluations. Yet, the legislation does not provide detailed instructions on how, where and in what scope the results should be published.
Our publication Quality Management in the Finnish Education System provides an overview of the state of quality management in the Finnish education system. The publication contains FINEEC’s tasks related to its evaluations of quality management systems and provision of support for quality management in different fields of education and training.
The publication The main elements of quality management in the education and ECEC sector for its part gathers together the characteristics of functioning quality management. The publication explains the concepts of quality management and condenses them into five main elements that will help to structure quality management and improve its effectiveness. In addition, the national actors in the field of quality management and their different roles at the different levels of education are described in the publication.
More information
More information about evaluation at different levels of education and support for quality management is available on the pages specific to the different levels of education.
- Early childhood education
- Pre-primary, primary and lower secondary education
- General upper secondary education
- Vocational education
- Higher education
Relevant legislation (in Finnish):
Chairman of FINEEC’s Quality Management Team
