Quality Assurance Framework (QAF)
Celebrating Women's Community Education: The Women's Community Education Quality Assurance Framework Mainstreaming Project
The Quality Assurance Framework (QAF) Mainstreaming Project started in spring 2007.
QAF mainstreaming project is the follow on from a pilot project which ran from 2003-2005 involving 5 groups.
The Mainstream Phase involved Leaders attending six two-day workshops from September 2007 to June 2008. Every time Leaders came to a training workshop where they prepared to go back and facilitate one quality assurance workshop with a quality assurance working group convened by management in their organizations . The quality assurance happens over six stages or six workshops and culminates in a quality assurance plan in which groups identify how they will address gaps in practice in their work that they have identified throughout the process.
The objectives of the project are to:
- Train 60 leaders (two from 30 affiliate groups) to lead their groups through the quality assurance process and support those leaders as they help their groups to apply the framework;
- Ensure that the QAF becomes a self-directed process by writing and publishing a "facilitator's guide" that groups can use by themselves to quality assure their work without support;
- Establish clear connections between FETAC and HETAC and the QAF;
- Constitute an independent women's community education quality assurance support structure that can award a quality stamp to those groups who have gone through the quality assurance programme, and
- Identify and establish a sustainable funding programme for women's community education in Ireland.
As some Leaders from the second Dublin training workshop reported, participating in the process had facilitated members of their organizations to develop, "A shared awareness about the work and a sense of belonging together as an organization [as well as] renewed energy and confidence in our work."
Read about the QAF Seminar on November 19th!
Click here to download a copy of the Quality Assurance Framework
