Plan to reduce university bureaucracy introduced

Minister Jet Bussemaker of Education wants to reduce the amount of bureaucracy in the monitoring of higher education. According to the Minister, the emphasis is currently focused too much on accountability instead of improving education and this should change. In Bussemaker's new plans she wants to pay less attention to the system and the rules imposed from above, and more to the education itself and the way of ensuring quality. She therefore want teachers and lecturers to be the owners of quality guarantees by reducing the administrative burden. In the new system, education programs will still be evaluated by expert colleagues every six years, but they will no longer automatically lose accreditation after 6 years. Instead accreditation will be valid for an indefinite period, and the evaluation will look at whether there are grounds to withdraw it. The minister also wants to give teachers and students more of a say in the assessment of their education in the new system. Students will have the right to write their own chapter in the evaluation of their education. There should always be at least one student in the evaluation panel. In 2017 Bussemaker is also launching an experiment with a quality mark on an institutional level. Three universities and three colleges will participate in this experiment, in which the accreditation will take place at an institutional level, instead of accreditation being done by the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO). Bussemaker sees this as a sign of confidence in the institutions. The experiment will be evaluated in 2020.