Quality assurance and quality management represent a systemic effort in Romania, institutionally controlled. Therefore, the institutional capacity building was equally important as the empowerment of multiple actors involved, their active participation and support.

In the school education sub-system (from pre-primary education to upper secondary education inclusively) the quality improvement driven model is based on a support system, based on the coordinated and coherent actions undertaken at national, regional and local level.

At the national level of the education system, the quality assurance strategy is implemented by the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in School Education.

This agency is responsible for:

• external evaluation of the quality of education offered by schools;
• authorization, accreditation and evaluation schools.

The purpose of the external evaluation is mainly (i) to certify the capacity of the schools to meet the quality standards, (ii) to play a role in the development of a "culture of quality" in school education institutions, and (iii) to recommend policies and strategies to the Ministry of National Education and Scientific Research in order to improve the quality of education.

As far as the university education system is concerned, a similar national agency was established in 2006, namely the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.

One major change has been that universities are now less strictly controlled by the Ministry of National Education and Scientific Research. However, in every university growing autonomy should be accompanied by the development of a quality assurance system that safeguards the quality of university education and highlights differences between universities in terms of educational performance. Universities are very much aware that their appeal among students is largely determined by their ability to deliver tangible results. Furthermore, Romanian universities are implementing an effective quality assurance system in order to prepare for future competition with other universities.

From this perspective, the main principles of Romanian quality assurance system focus on: 

• the European Dimension, characterized by the integration in the European Higher Education Area of all Romanian higher education institutions;
• institutional responsibility, considered as a concept based on the principle of academic autonomy;
• institutional diversity, guaranteed through the external quality evaluation of all study programmes;
• cooperation of all the components of the education system as parts of a whole system;
• a performance-based system, by reference to the position obtained in quality assurance/evaluation;
• institutional identity, by influencing good practices and successfull structures in the field of academic quality;
• internal institutional self-evaluation, as universities present the specificity of the quality culture through self-evaluation reports, continuous performance improvements;
• external evaluation, by monitoring the results reported by universities, through analysis of performance and relationship with the stated institutional reality (including student activities, conformity to the stated standards);
• improvement of quality – the main objective of all higher education institutions and, therefore, of the Romanian quality assurance system.