Development of operations

FINEEC constantly develops its activities. The enhancement work is aimed at improving the customer-oriented approach and impact of FINEEC’s evaluations and other activities as well as its internal activities.

To support this enhancement work, FINEEC systematically gathers feedback on the evaluations it has conducted and requests feedback from its stakeholders. In addition, FINEEC participates in the external evaluation of its own activities.

The cycle of continuous improvement as the basis for FINEEC’s quality management

FINEEC is responsible for the quality of its activities and its continuous improvement. Quality management is an integral part of FINEEC’s management and steering of its activities. Quality management supports FINEEC’s strategy and the achievement of its strategic goals. The implementation of the strategy, activities and the achievement of goals are systematically evaluated. FINEEC’s activities are continuously developed and improved, utilising information obtained from evaluation and feedback systems.

FINEEC does not have a separate quality system or manual, but instead quality management is built into FINEEC’s steering of activities and the intranet, which brings together the key elements of quality management. The purpose is to maintain the agility of quality management in an organisation of the size of FINEEC. Another purpose is to make quality management a natural part of the daily activities of FINEEC’s staff.

The quality management is based on Deming’s cycle of continuous improvement – the so-called PDCA-cycle (Plan, Do, Study, Act). The idea of the model is a spiralling cycle of planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and development of activities. The goal is the continuous learning and improvement of the organisation. In addition to the areas based on the cycle of continuous improvement, the key elements of the quality management are external steering of activities, FINEEC’s strategy and management system. The key elements of FINEEC’s quality management have been visualised in the cycle of continuous improvement. See the visualisation here (pdf). Text equivalent of the image.

Collection of feedback on evaluations

FINEEC systematically collects feedback on all evaluations it has implemented. Feedback is collected from both the organisations evaluated and the evaluation teams.

The aim of collecting feedback is to:

Ensure that FINEEC’s strategy and values are implemented in the evaluations.
Provide information on how the evaluation processes work.
Provide information on the strengths and development needs in FINEEC’s activities.
Strengthen the customer-oriented approach in the evaluations.
Improve the use of the evaluation data.
Ensure that FINEEC successfully carries out its statutory duty.

Every year, FINEEC provides its stakeholders with a summary of the received feedback and the development measures based on it.

Stakeholder survey

A stakeholder survey is carried out during autumn 2020.

The previous survey among FINEEC’s key stakeholders was conducted in 2018. The target group of the survey included early childhood education and care providers, education and training providers, higher education institutions, representatives of educational administration, NGO’s, representatives of organisations involved in teaching and education, and representatives of working life.

The purpose of the survey was to investigate how different stakeholders found their cooperation with FINEEC and what kind of information they hoped FINEEC would produce. In addition, the survey was used to find out how successfully FINEEC had managed to cooperate and communicate with its stakeholders and what kind of reputation it had among the different stakeholders.

The majority of the respondents were familiar with FINEEC’s activities and satisfied with the cooperation. The respondents said they used the information produced by FINEEC actively. They called for less burdensome evaluations and improvements in the dissemination of evaluation results.

The results of the survey will be used in the development of FINEEC’s activities. FINEEC will especially pay attention to making the data collection in the evaluations less burdensome and improve communication.

Read more about the results of the stakeholder survey here (in Finnish).

The stakeholder survey is conducted every two years.

Evaluation of FINEEC’s activities

The Ministry of Education and Culture will implement an international evaluation of FINEEC in 2022.

An ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) external review of FINEEC is conducted in 2021. The review will be conducted by an international panel of experts appointed by ENQA. The site visit is scheduled for September 2021.

The previous ENQA review was conducted between 2016 and 2017. The review focused particularly on the compliance of FINEEC’s higher education evaluation activities with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area. However, some parts of the review applied to the entire FINEEC organisation (e.g. the goals and objectives, official status, independence, internal quality assurance and resources of the organisation). FINEEC passed the review, its full membership in ENQA was reconfirmed and it renewed its listing in the register of trusted European quality assurance agencies (European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education, EQAR).

Read more about ENQA review and the final report here.