On 30 May 2017, the European Commission presented its new strategy to support high quality, inclusive and future-oriented school and higher education. This project directly follow this strategy by focusing on the Public Administration (PA) education and its quality, which hasn't been targeted comprehensively yet. The present era and challenges of the European integration, globalization, and massive requirements on a good democratic governance, stimulating inclusive economic growth and social well-being, call for a new generation of public administration professionals capable to cope with these challenges. There is a huge demand on the educational and research institutions to provide human resources to fulfill this gap and to provide research outcomes, which could be applied as necessary background for development of good policies on national as well as supra-national levels. The mentioned demand requires a proper quality of high level PA programs. The high level PA education is a relatively new field in the new EU members, because it has been re-established there since the early 1990s, when the Communist Parties´ regimes collapsed. Within this context, numerous national accreditation systems have not recognized these programs as an independent field of study yet. Over the past two decades many new PA programs have been developed, but they differ very much and are based on different national accreditation systems, which could be hardly comparable trans- nationally. The EAPAA was established in 1999 in order to promote the "European quality" in the field. But very few of the public administration programs from the EU new member countries have been involved in such an international quality evaluation of their programs yet, but there are numerous benefits that an effective quality assessment process can produce for the participating institutions. In addition there is no comprehensive mapping of these programs nor cooperation among them in terms of quality enhancement. Therefore the applicant has created the Strategic Partnership with the EAPAA and additional eight partner universities from the new EU member countries with an objective to enhance the quality of high education in the public administration and related programs in the NMS of the EU towards the European quality level , and towards their relevance for the practice. Special focus will be on PA programs in the Slovak Republic, the location of the applicant and 3 project partners. EAPAA standards implemented directly through accreditation or certification, or indirectly through promotion and fostering of an adoption of EAPAA´s requirements into national quality assurance systems, will serve as a tool for an achievement of the project objective. The innovative methodology of the whole project is based on mutual learning and cooperation of all partners. It will allow all HEIs to be involved in an international external evaluation in roles of evaluators. Traditionally are these programs only a subject of an evaluation by an evaluation agency. This will provide them with a knowledge and experience for fostering necessary changes on national levels, and EAPAA as well. Simultaneously they will become equipped with necessary tools and experience for self- assessment and an enhancement of their own programs towards European quality. The goal of the project will be achieved within three years by an implementation of the following activities and outputs: 8 Intellectual Outputs which include 11 country studies on public administration education and national quality assessment systems, development of an open source for quality sharing in PA education, establishment of communication tools among the programs and relevant quality assurance agencies, implementation of 16 international evaluations of public administration programs and providing these programs with an advice for an improvement, development of at least 8 self-evaluation studies and two feasibility studies for an improvement of the partners' programs and 8 additional, implementation of 6 multiplier events in 6 countries attended by 120 participants, implementation of two 3days learning events - workshops in two countries, with 30 participants, analyzing opportunities of the EAPAA accreditation in the new EU member countries, development of a summary study - an e-publication on The Policy Recommendations for Quality Enhancement of Public Administration Programs in the new EU Member States. The project will contribute to the quality enhancement of all participating programs and many others (more then 100 in 11NMS, with several thousands students) involved in the project activities towards the European quality level and their relevance for the practice, and consequently the quality of civil service in these countries in a long run. All partners will naturally continue in the maintenance and utilization of the project outputs in lines with their missions after the project end.
PAQUALITY project focused on Public Administration (PA) education and its quality in the New Members States (NMS) of the EU, which have not yet been targeted comprehensively. The present era and challenges of European integration, globalization and extensive requirements on good democratic governance, stimulating inclusive economic growth, social well-being, and crises management, which is crucial, due to the present Covid-19 pandemic, call for a new generation of PA professionals capable of coping with these challenges. This demand requires a high quality of high-level PA programmes. NISPAcee has therefore created a Strategic Partnership with the European Association for Public Administration Accreditation (EAPAA) and an additional eight partner universities from the New Member States of the EU (3 from Slovakia, and 1 each from Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia) with the objective of enhancing the quality of higher education in both PA and related programmes in the NMS of the EU towards the European quality level and their relevance in practice. The main aim of the PAQUALITY project was to enhance the changes in the area of PA education in conformity with the Bologna objectives, mainly: By promoting European cooperation in quality assurance/international accreditation with a view to developing comparable criteria and methodologies, and By promoting the necessary European dimensions in higher education, particularly with regard to curricular development, inter-institutional co-operation, mobility schemes and integrated programmes of study, training and research, which have not yet been fully applied in the area of public administration higher education in the new EU states. The project consisted of a number of research activities (surveys, interviews, documentary analyses, desk research) and internal and external consultations, which resulted in 8 project Intellectual Outputs. In addition, a comprehensive database of almost 500 PA programmes from 11 MNS was developed in order to communicate with all programmes in the targeted region. The first step was to collect the necessary data for the research, then to raise awareness of programmes on international quality assessment (8 PA programmes outside the partnership undertook an international evaluation of their programmes’ quality, based on the EAPAA criteria within the Intellectual Output 4) and thirdly, for the dissemination of the project outputs so that all programmes could benefit from them. Two 3-day workshops were organized, which enabled project partners to gain a deeper insight and understanding of the major characteristics of PA education systems, their relevance to practice and the standards and practices of quality assurance and accreditation systems at a national and international level in NMS. Multiplier events, organized in all 6 countries covered by the project partnership towards the end of the project, provided an excellent opportunity for the project researchers to obtain feedback on their findings and also served for the promotion and dissemination of the project aims and outputs. The innovative methodology of the entire project was based on the mutual learning and cooperation of all partners. It allowed all HEIs to be involved in an international external evaluation in the roles of evaluators. This provided them with the knowledge and experience and simultaneously, they became equipped with the necessary tools and experience for self-assessment and the enhancement of their own programmes towards European quality. The final Intellectual Output 8 represents a comprehensive overview and summary of the findings and knowledge gained and experience resulting from the activities of the PAQUALITY project launched between 2018 - 2021 by NISPAcee, in cooperation with major partners, namely EAPAA, Masaryk University, Corvinus University of Budapest, Ljubljana University, Babes-Bolyai University and other HEIs from the new member states.Based on the experience and findings of the project team, a number of recommendations were concluded in order to improve the accreditation process, both at a national and international level. It also contains comments and recommendations for the achievement of European quality in PA education and opportunities for EAPAA accreditation/certifications. Opportunities for the acceptance of the EAPAA accreditation at national levels have been reviewed, and recommendations towards this end have been developed for selected countries. An e-publication was published by NISPAcee Press based on the final project output entitled: Public Administration Education Quality Enhancement in the EU’s New Member States, ISBN: 978-80-99939-06-7. The book will serve both teaching and learning purposes and also a wide dissemination of the project findings and recommendations which can be downloaded from the project website: https://www.nispa.org/paquality.php?proj_id=16&sid=1903.