Accreditation should validate quality culture, not performance

Accreditation has long been recognised as an important instrument for ensuring the quality of educational institutions.

Schools, madrasahs, universities, and study programmes are assessed against a number of standards and indicators to determine the extent to which the quality of their educational provision can be accounted for to the public.

Behind this, there is a fundamental question we need to ask: should the quality of education primarily be demonstrated when accreditation takes place? This question is important because educational quality is not a momentary event. Quality is the result of a process that takes place every day.

A quality school or study programme is not one that merely looks good when assessors are about to visit, but one that is consistently able to plan, implement, evaluate, and improve its educational provision.

Therefore, it is time to strengthen the paradigm of educational quality assurance. Quality is built from within through the Internal Quality Assurance System (SPMI), while accreditation functions primarily as an external validator of the quality culture that has been built.

Internal quality assurance must not be understood merely as an administrative obligation. SPMI is essentially a system that enables every educational institution to know its quality position, set targets, identify gaps, make improvements, monitor results, and use evaluation outcomes to determine the next steps.

Thus, SPMI is in fact a continuous improvement cycle. The cycle applies not only to schools and madrasahs in primary and secondary education, but also to universities and study programmes.

A study programme, for example, should periodically know whether its curriculum is relevant, how the quality of its teaching is, how student achievement is progressing, how lecturers are performing, what the student experience is like, how graduates are absorbed into the world of work, and how feedback from graduate employers is used to improve the programme.

If this process is carried out consistently, quality assurance will gradually no longer be felt as additional work but will become a quality culture. In a quality culture, school principals, teachers, education staff, lecturers, study programme managers, students, and stakeholders understand that quality is not the responsibility of a particular unit alone. Quality becomes part of the way the organisation works.

Problems arise when accreditation becomes a separate momentum detached from the daily life of the educational institution. When accreditation is approaching, schools or study programmes become busy collecting documents, arranging evidence, compiling reports, and preparing various things needed for the visit.

After the process is complete, these activities can subside again. If so, we need to ask: what are we actually assessing — the quality that takes place every day, or the ability of the educational institution to prepare itself for accreditation?

Accreditation is certainly still necessary. The public needs an independent external mechanism to gain confidence that an educational institution or study programme meets certain quality standards.

The government also needs reliable information for guidance and policy-making. What needs to change is not the existence of accreditation, but its position and function within the overall quality assurance system.

Accreditation should not be the sole engine driving quality. The main engine must be within the educational institution through SPMI.

In this paradigm, the relationship between SPMI and accreditation becomes clear. SPMI builds and maintains a quality culture. Accreditation validates whether that quality culture truly exists and is functioning effectively.

Assessors do not come primarily to check whether the educational institution has prepared special documents for accreditation. Assessors need to see the track record of how the institution assures its own quality.

Does the institution have clear quality targets? Are those targets based on data? Is there a gap between the actual condition and the target? Is that gap followed up? Do improvement programmes produce change? Are evaluation results used to improve subsequent planning?

If the answers can be demonstrated consistently, that is where the quality culture becomes visible. Thus, accreditation evidence should ideally not be something ‘made for accreditation’. The evidence is a natural product of day-to-day quality management processes.

This paradigm is very important to apply in higher education, particularly in study programme accreditation. A study programme should not only conduct self-evaluation when accreditation time arrives.

Self-evaluation should be an academic habit. Study programmes must continuously use data to understand their strengths, weaknesses, improvement opportunities, and performance achievements.

For example, data on learning processes, graduate learning outcomes, study duration, graduation, student achievement, research, community service, publications, partnerships, tracer studies, and student and graduate employer satisfaction should not be collected solely for accreditation purposes.

Such data must be used to make decisions and improve the study programme. If a study programme already has such a quality culture, the accreditation process should become simpler.

Assessors simply validate whether the system is truly working and whether the results are consistent with the available evidence. In this way, accreditation does not push universities to create new administration, but instead encourages them to strengthen the system that is already needed to manage study programmes with quality.

This paradigm shift also has the potential to reduce the administrative burden on educational institutions. One of the complaints frequently raised is the large number of documents that must be prepared for various quality assurance purposes.

Yet, if the data system and SPMI are working well, the data needed for accreditation should already be available in the institution’s management system. Therefore, there needs to be synchronisation between SPMI and the accreditation system.

Data and evidence produced by SPMI become the main source of information for accreditation. Accreditation does not need to ask institutions to produce new documents that are not used in day-to-day management.

With that principle, accreditation can become more efficient. Educational institutions no longer work hard to ‘prepare for accreditation’, but continuously prepare themselves to become quality educational institutions.

A more fundamental change is the shift in orientation from compliance to continuous improvement. Accreditation that is too compliance-oriented risks making educational institutions think, ‘What must we prepare to meet the indicators?’

Conversely, a quality culture encourages a different question: ‘What do we need to improve so that learners, students, graduates, and the public receive better educational services?’

The difference between these questions appears simple, but the consequences are enormous. The first question can give rise to an administrative culture. The second gives rise to a quality culture.

Accreditation results should also not stop at a rating or status. Accreditation findings and recommendations must return to the SPMI cycle as material for further improvement.

Thus, a healthy cycle is formed: SPMI produces data and improvements; accreditation validates; validation results become input for SPMI; and SPMI in turn drives quality improvement.

Accreditation retains an important function as a form of public accountability. The public has the right to obtain reliable information about the quality of schools, madrasahs, universities, and study programmes.

Public trust will be stronger if accreditation status not only describes the condition of an institution at a particular moment, but also reflects the institution’s ability to assure and improve its quality continuously.

What we need to build is not merely an increasingly sophisticated accreditation system, but a healthy quality assurance ecosystem. Every educational institution must have the ability to look at itself in the mirror through SPMI. Accreditation bodies then become independent parties that check whether that internal mirror matches reality.

The success of educational quality assurance should not be measured by how well schools, madrasahs, universities, or study programmes face accreditation. A more important measure is how well they assure their quality when they are not being accredited.

If a quality culture is already alive, accreditation is no longer something to be feared or specially prepared for. Accreditation becomes a natural process to validate quality that has indeed become a culture.

Accreditation should not be an examination that makes educational institutions busy preparing themselves when the time comes. Accreditation should validate the quality culture that has been built through internal quality assurance and takes place every day.