Finding Criteria of Quality for Faculties of Education

A current problem in the decision-making sphere in relation to public universities is the attempt to increase quality at the expense of quantity. One result is an attempt to transform the originally majority norma¬tive funding of universities in the direction of a model that would better reflect the qualitative criteria of different schools. For the funding of public universities in 2012 a system has been created involving 14 quali-tative and performance indicators by means of which 15% of the normative part of the budget will be redistributed. This system cannot be regarded as in anyway optimal in relation to faculties of education, however, and the authors of the article therefore try to propose criteria that would better reflect their distinctive features and so make for a more valid assessment of their qualities. These criteria should be premised on the main mission of education faculties, which is not scientific activity but the training of high-quality teaching staff. This fact needs to be reflected in the assessment criteria. The first of these criteria is the success of graduates on the employment market (or level of unemployment of graduates), above all in teaching jobs.. Another area is that of research activities in subject didactics. Related to this is the realisation of doctoral study programmes and the accreditation of habilitation (second doctoral) procedures and procedures for obtaining professorial status. Another criterion should be the ac-tivities of education faculties in the field of the further education of teaching staff. The education faculties ought to the the specialist guarantors and main providers of this service. Specific publication outputs - text-books for primary and secondary schools, handbooks of method, work papers, teaching aids in the widest sense of the word - should be another indicator of quality. Great stress should be put on student and graduate evaluations of education faculties, but here a valid tool of evaluation first needs to be created. The question of the assessment of the quality of faculties of education needs to be the subject of serious discussions leading to he drawing up of a planning document propos-ing concrete and checkable performance and quality indicators for these kinds of academic institution.