Clas Hättestrand, Vice President. Photo: Sören Andersson/Stockholms universitet


In December, the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ) announced its decision on its review of Stockholm University’s quality assurance work in education. We received the overall rating “Approved quality assurance processes with reservations”. Admittedly, it would have been more positive to receive the grade “Approved quality assurance processes”, which several higher education institutions received in the same review, but on the other hand, it was better than being assessed “Quality assurance processes under review”, which is the third possible outcome.

The university now has two years to implement measures and report these in a report (åtgärdsredovisning), which will be reviewed by UKÄ. After that, we hope to have the assessment changed to “Approved quality assurance processes”.

UKÄ’s evaluation found that the university’s quality assurance system showed shortcomings in two main areas – student influence and working life and collaboration. The university will, of course, take the authority’s criticism into account, as well as the identified areas for improvement. 

However, parts of the authority’s criticism were unexpected in areas where we believe we have good systems in place. This is especially the case in the area of student influence. We believe that we have worked together with the student union in recent years to create a very constructive and successful collaboration that promotes student influence at all levels within the university. Confirmation that we have come a long way in this work is that other higher education institutions seek us out to learn more about our system and our work to promote student influence. However, much of UKÄ’s criticism centred around how student influence works in practice in our education programmes rather than around regulatory compliance, and it is apparent that we have some work to do there.

In addition, when it comes to working life and collaboration, we are a little surprised by the outcome; for example, our own follow-ups show that students from Stockholm University become well-established in the labour market after graduation to an even greater extent than students at other, comparable higher education institutions. We also feel that we have well-balanced collaborations within our education programmes, where our vocational training programmes collaborate with the working community to make the programmes as relevant as possible; for example, we have program councils or labour market councils that include external participation.

Other education programmes work towards a very broad labour market, and a certain portion of these programmes are of a purely educational nature. Here, the work to link the programmes to the labour market naturally takes other forms, for example, through external lecturers or internships. We believe that this diversity reflects the different needs within our education programmes. However, UKÄ’s evaluation group found that we should have a system that looks the same for all education programmes at the university. The work to respond to the authority’s recommendations, of course, presents a challenge, but we must now undertake to review how we can develop our work in the Vice Presidentarea of working life and collaboration to satisfy the need to be both functional and needs-adapted while still maintaining a large-scale system.


This article was written by Vice President Clas Hättestrand. It appears in the section “Words from the University’s senior management team”, where different members of the management team take turns writing about topical issues. “Words from the University’s senior management team” appears in every edition of News for staff, which is distributed to the entirety of the University staff.