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Eurydice

EACEA National Policies Platform:Eurydice
Quality Assurance

Last update: 19 April 2025


This chapter describes quality assurance and evaluation at the different levels of Luxembourg’s education system according to the following definitions provided by Eurypedia:

“Quality assurance can be understood as an all-embracing term referring to policies, procedures and practices that are designed to achieve, maintain or enhance quality in specific areas, and that rely on an evaluation process. By ‘evaluation’, we understand a general process of systematic and critical analysis of a defined subject that includes the collection of relevant data and leads to judgement and/or recommendations for improvement. The evaluation can focus on various subjects: educational institutions, school heads, teachers and other educational staff, programmes, local authorities, or the performance of the education system as a whole.”

Different approaches and methods are implemented:

  • School education: Recent reforms (see chapter 14.3) have aimed at increasing school quality by providing schools with a greater scope of autonomy and intensified monitoring and support. Support for internal evaluation is provided by the Agency for Quality (AQ – Agence-Qualité) of the Ministry of Education, Children and Youth (MENJE – Ministère de l’éducation nationale, de l'Enfance et de la Jeunesse) while external evaluation of the education system is outsourced to the University of Luxembourg.
  • In higher education, there are two schemes of quality assurance
    • Short-cycle programmes leading to Advanced Technician’s Diplomas (BTS –Brevet de technicien supérieur) are evaluated externally before being accredited by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR – ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche) for a duration of five years. After these five years, the accreditation has to be renewed on the basis of a new evaluation. This procedure should ensure the programmes' relevance for the professional sector concerned.
    • The University of Luxembourg is subjected to internal and external improvement oriented evaluation, which has to cover all activities such as administration, education, research and the professors’ work (Loi du 12 août 2003 portant création de l'Université du Luxembourg, article 43).
  • In adult education, different forms of quality assurance are employed. They are bound to the distribution of State grants: i.e. non-profit organisations demanding a co-financing of their courses have to abide to the principles of the Quality Label of the Ministry of Education - Service for Adult Education (SFA – Service de la formation des adultes). Companies which demand a co-funding of continuous vocational training in the company (see article 3.3) for a total investment of more than 75’000€ for one year have to submit training plans as well as final reports, which are evaluated before the subsidy is granted. Furthermore, some private providers commit themselves to quality assurance approaches. However, a large part of the offer of adult education is not subjected to systematic evaluation or quality assurance.

Besides, Luxembourg participates in different international studies (PISA, PEARLs, ELLI, OECD studies and reports, …) which provide feedback on the system’s performance at different levels.