Uzbekistan establishes National Agency for Education Quality Assurance

Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) — In accordance with a Presidential Decree dated May 5, Uzbekistan has established the National Agency for Education Quality Assurance under the Administration of the President. The agency is being formed on the basis of the “Education Projects Center,” with its current head, Adkham Khudoykulov, retaining his position.

The agency’s primary mandate is to carry out comprehensive and special state accreditation of institutions engaged in secondary specialized, vocational, higher, and postgraduate education, as well as organizations involved in professional retraining and advanced training.

Key functions include:

Comprehensive accreditation: to be conducted once every five years based on an external independent evaluation of an institution’s performance.

Special accreditation: required for all new educational programs prior to their launch.

A failure to pass comprehensive accreditation or the failure to correct identified violations within a set period will result in license revocation. If serious flaws in an educational program are not addressed in time, the program and student admissions may be suspended. Affected students will be transferred to similar institutions under the supervision of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Innovation.

The agency will also be authorized to conduct unscheduled inspections of educational institutions based on risk analysis, which will consider complaints, sociological survey results, and publications in the media or social networks. Institutions found in violation will be issued a mandatory directive to correct shortcomings, with failure to comply triggering extraordinary accreditation procedures.

All identified deficiencies from either accreditation processes or risk analysis must be addressed by the respective educational institutions.

The agency is also tasked with:

Maintaining a national ranking of educational institutions, based on a comparative assessment of education quality and research output;

Conducting a nationwide employer survey to assess the alignment of graduate qualifications with labor market needs.

The Institute for the Development of the National Qualifications System will be incorporated into the agency, which will operate under the direct oversight of the President of Uzbekistan.