On 2 October 2024, the final conference of the project entitled “Road to Automatic Recognition of Higher Education Access Qualifications (ARAQUA) took place in Tallinn, Estonia, gathering key stakeholders and experts in the field of recognition of qualifications. 

The event, hosted by ENIC-NARIC Estonia, marked an important milestone in exploring the challenges and possibilities of automatic recognition of access qualifications across Europe.

The conference brought together representatives from eight participating countries – Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Romania, Slovakia and the United Kingdom, other European higher education experts, as well as representatives of the European Commission and the Council of Europe. 

The Chair of the Council of Europe Steering Committee for Education, Marie-Anne Persoons delivered a keynote presentation “Unpacking the concept of automatic recognition of access qualifications to higher education: how to lift obstacles to mutual trust”. The Head of the Higher and Further Education Unit, Catherine Dolgova-Dreyer spoke about the perspectives on automatic recognition of higher education access qualifications, presenting the work of the Council of Europe Ad Hoc Working Group on Automatic Recognition. 

Over the course of the ARAQUA project, 21 higher education access qualifications from 8 countries were mapped and described in the comparative report. The project also produced recommendations on automatic recognition of higher education access qualifications in the ARAQUA countries, which contain general principles that could also be applied to other countries.