Last week, BAC held our annual stakeholder event and celebrated our 40th anniversary welcoming attendees both online and in-person. With over 50 attendees from across 8 different countries we had panel sessions, ENQA workshops and a discussion on the future of AI in education and quality assurance.

Our panel of Chairs and Honorary President discussed BAC’s formation in 1984 as an agency focused on the UK and how it transitioned over the years to the proactive, strategic and international approach we have today where we embrace how the process of educational inspections includes the enhancement they give to quality assurance.  As our current Chair of the Council, Professor Phil Cardew stated “quality assurance should be good for students, institutions and nations”.

One of the strengths of BAC is the diversity of the organisation through our variety of accredited providers and the expertise of our staff, inspectors, Committee and Council members allowing BAC to continue to operate as an agile, independent and outward facing agency able to respond to the challenging and everchanging educational landscape. We asked our stakeholders to tell us how they would describe BAC and along with many other words they described us as ‘institution friendly’, a focus on ‘quality’, ‘professional’, ‘voluntary’ and ‘transparent’, terms which align with our values.

This year is one where BAC is undergoing an external review in order to renew our membership of ENQA and maintain our place on the EQAR listing. Our workshop on the upcoming review and how BAC has embedded the recommendations received from EQNA allowed us to seek feedback from our stakeholders on demonstrating how we meet the European Standards and Guidelines 2015. BAC is currently writing the self assessment report which will be submitted to ENQA in June before having an onsite review in September 2024.

As an agency we seek to keep our stakeholders informed about topical developments in higher and further education and this year we looked at the impact of AI in education and the risks and opportunities for educational institutions. With possible use in assessment and monitoring, the consideration of how to humanise AI was also reinforced – specifically that institutions needed to tailor the use of AI so that it worked best for them.  BAC welcomes suggestions from our stakeholders on any topics they would like to be included on our webinar programme so please do get in touch.

We look forward to seeing as many of you all at our next event and thank you for those who joined us.