Quality policy
The Quality policy of the University of UNamur
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Situated in the heart of Belgium, in the Walloon capital city, the UNamur is well-known for always putting the human at the center of its priorities. This human dimension is the fruit of its Jesuit heritage and of its values, which are: openness, excellency, sustainability and freedom.
Openness: In its missions of creating and transmitting knowledge, the University has an open attitude to the world and an inclusive approach toward all people, regardless of their age, role, origins or status.
Excellence: In each of its missions, the University of Namur strives for excellence, with a human-centric approach combining teacher-student proximity, solidarity and respect.
A responsible actor: the University contributes actively and responsibly to the development of a sustainable society. Particular attention is also paid to personal development and wellbeing of each individual: students, researchers, teachers and staff.
The freedom of opinion: the university defends the freedom of expression of its members and encourages individual autonomy and responsibility. It strongly supports the concepts of collective intelligence, knowledge creation and innovation.
The UNamur‘s quality approach integrates these precious values and has been incorporated to the university’s global strategy, which states as objectives to :
- Position itself within the Walloon-Brussels federal landscape with a clear, strong, and well-known identity thanks to its ambitious and meaningful trainings and its forefront research, while continuing its internationalization.
- Extend by attracting more and more students, researchers, and employees.
- Intensify its student-teacher proximity and guarantee the quality of life on the campus by assuring a clear and transparent communication to bring people together, by, for example clearly establishing everyone’s roles and responsibilities within the institution.
- Develop tools to help make its organization more efficient, take quick decisions and better manage its spendings.
- Be innovative in its education and research by supporting creative and innovative projects as well as in its knowledge transmission towards society.
- Use the lessons brought by the sanitary crisis and integrate them in its development, proximity, efficiency, and innovation ambitions.
To have a quality approach, what does it mean for our university?
Beforehand, the distinction between “quality” and “quality approach” should be clarified. On the one hand, “Quality” makes part of the everyday life of our university, it is present in each of its task and activity and, is translated by our continuous search for excellency in each of our missions. Everything is therefore done to offer an open training to all, as well as quality services and research.
On the other hand, the “quality approach” focuses on the processes in place to achieve our quality objectives, as improving the quality of life on the campus, offering a quality and innovative education or even, supporting research projects. It ensures to always look for continuous improvement, by external and internal assessments, by setting up strategic objectives for the institution and developing tools to achieve them.
How does the quality approach work in our university?
The quality approach centers on three main themes of actions:
- The internal and external assessments of our education programs and research, but also of our institutional management.
- The continuous improvement projects (for example: setting up of new tools, process simplification or performance improvement)
- The visibility by and for our peers and their informal feedback (through rankings, surveys, publications, …).
On which topics can the quality approach be seen?
Our institution has three main missions in which the quality approach is involved:
- Our training and education mission which involves to provide quality trainings leading to degrees recognized at national and European levels, as well as training certificates;
- Our research and development mission which enables our researchers to tackle any societal issue without limits in the subjects proposed;
- Our mission of service to society which gives us the opportunity to share our knowledge acquired through our research in different possible ways: conferences, articles, analysis, spin-offs launching, trainings, support for secondary school teachers…
The three university missions are taken care of by and for different stakeholders within our institution:
- Internal stakeholders: students, teachers, scientists, administrative, technical and management employees;
- External stakeholders: guest members, internship supervisors, industry partners, academics, FNRS, ARES, ect.
What does this quality approach bring in for us? What are the aimed objectives?
Our approach ensures better control of processes and the development of a collaborative continuous improvement culture. It enables us to meet the needs and expectations of our external and internal stakeholders in a sustainable way. The quality policy should be the driver for progress or the foundation for the development of our projects, while guaranteeing regular feedbacks on our quality systems.
The main objective of our quality approach is to always look for a permanent improvement of our processes to guarantee the quality of :
- Our education and research;
- Our services;
- Of the working environment of our students and employees
- Of our communication between the different stakeholders.
