INSTITUTIONAL AUDIT OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AS AN IMPORTANT COMPONENT OF ENSURING THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION IN UKRAINE

Abstract

The article analyzes the experience of conducting institutional audits of general secondary education institutions in Ukraine in 2019-2021.
 The research highlights the positive aspects of institutional audit, including: audit by independent state structures with the participation of trained experts who have undergone training organized by the State Education Quality Service of Ukraine; unification and publication on the Service’s website the assessment directions, requirements/rules for the organization of educational processes, criteria, indicators and assessment tools; synchronous use of a wide range of tools in institutional audit procedures; clear regulation and experts’ unconditional compliance with the audit procedure; evaluation of the activities of educational institutions in their interaction with the founders and territorial communities; taking into account the opinion of the participants in the educational process; focusing the institutional audit on providing consulting assistance to the institutions; non-interference of the experts in the educational process; the possibility of carrying out separate assessment procedures remotely; granting the right to the experts, managers and/or founders of educational institutions to record the evaluation and inspection procedures by means of audio, photo and video means; the possibility of using the results of an institutional audit to generalize educational information and track the trends in the development of the educational sphere throughout Ukraine.
 The main problematic aspects of the audit are considered, including: the lack of procedures for assessing the quality of education in the institutional audit; the lack of consistency of the criteria and indicators for evaluating educational and management processes with regard to the content of the professional competencies of the teacher and the head of the educational institution, defined by the relevant professional standards; the inability of the State Education Quality Service of Ukraine to audit a significant number of educational institutions; the complexity of the institutional audit toolkit for evaluating educational and management processes of educational institutions.
 It is emphasized that measures are being taken in the educational sphere to eliminate the mentioned negative aspects. In particular, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine has approved the Procedure for accreditation and keeping a register of public professional associations and other legal entities that carry out independent evaluation of the quality of education and educational activities of general secondary education institutions, which will allow non-state structures to be involved in public accreditation of educational institutions. In order to provide assistance to the experts in the assessment of educational and management processes in the institutions of general secondary education, the State Education Quality Service of Ukraine has developed and implemented the EvaluEd information and analytical system.
 It has been concluded that the institutional audit should be supplemented with the procedures and tools for evaluating the quality of education. In addition, it is advisable to supplement the criteria and indicators for evaluating educational and management processes with the criteria and indicators that will make it possible to assess the language-communicative and emotional-ethical competence of the teacher, the competence of the education head regarding the organization of the activities of the educational institution on the basis of the external system of ensuring the quality of education, to more fully assess psychological competence of the teacher as well as the leadership and informational-digital competence of the head of the general secondary education institution.