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 that needs to be asked: 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 appears good when it is about to be visited by assessors, 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 should 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 results to determine the next steps. Thus, SPMI is in fact a cycle of continuous improvement. This 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, how lecturer performance is, how the student experience is, how graduates are absorbed into the world of work, and how feedback from graduate users 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 about to take place, schools or study programmes are 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 needed. The public requires 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 should instead 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 look for whether the educational institution has prepared special documents for accreditation. Assessors need to see the track record of how the educational institution assures its own quality. Does the educational 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 proven consistently, that is where the quality culture is visible. Thus, accreditation evidence should ideally not be something ‘made for accreditation’. Such evidence is a natural product of the day-to-day quality management process. This paradigm is very important to apply in higher education, particularly in the accreditation of study programmes. A study programme should not only conduct self-evaluation when the accreditation period arrives. Self-evaluation should be an academic habit. Study programmes must continuously use data to understand their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for improvement, and performance achievements. For example, data on the learning process, graduate learning outcomes, study duration, graduation, student achievement, research, community service, publications, cooperation, tracer studies, and student and graduate user 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 need to validate whether the system is truly working and whether the results are consistent with the available evidence. In this way, accreditation does not encourage universities to create new administration, but rather encourages universities to strengthen the system that is indeed already needed for quality management.