Page 81 - Annual Report 2014-2015

REPORTS OF ASSOCIATED INTERNATIONAL ENGINEERING ASSOCIATIONS 81
preserve the mutual trust between agencies that have signed the EURACE Accord.
• A document “Best Practice in Engineering Programme Accreditation” (November 2015); this was a joint initiative between ENAEE and the International Engineering Alliance (IEA), which comprises the so-called Washington, Sydney and Dublin Accords. This document is highly signi cant as it represents an agreement and common understanding on best practice in engineering accreditation by countries and agencies all over the world. It is intended for use partly by bodies setting up as accreditation agencies or by existing agencies as they update their policies and procedures.
ENAEE is a lean organization with little requirement for hiring permanent staff at this time. Since its origin, it has been supplied with hosting, secretariat and of ce services by FEANI; these services and their costings, paid for by ENAEE, are speci ed in a service agreement signed in 2013. Beyond this technical support, FEANI is the main partner of ENAEE; both have different missions, even if they overlap occasionally, which gives rise to a strong partnership.
During the last year, ENAEE and FEANI have clari ed their relationship and have started several common projects as:
• The integration of the two databases that they maintain, respectively the “FEANI Index” and the “EUR-ACE database of accredited programmes”, through the use of shared, more ef cient software. The objectives are
to use the more robust software to update and maintain the two databases; this will be exploited indepen- dently by the two in accordance with their missions and responsibilities.
• FEANI and ENAEE support the “Engineers Europe” initi- ative: a common platform to increase the visibility of Engineering in Europe, to share costs of communications and information activities and represent engineers more ef ciently with the European institutions. In Europe, several institutions cover all aspects of the engineering domain: Education (BEST and SEFI), Quality Assurance and Accreditation (ENAEE), Professional practice (FEANI, EYE); their missions and activities are quite comple- mentary. Without coordination, their complementarities -and then the possible overlap of their activities-can be a source of duplication of activities and misunderstandings.
We have to thank the founding partners, all the ENAEE members and individuals who have invested during 10 years their time and experience to develop ENAEE. It has been a collective endeavour, where people from different cultures and backgrounds have worked together to build a common reference framework for engineering education. Beyond their diversity, they have ful lled the ENAEE initial mission “to enhance and promote the quality of the education of engineering graduates in order to facilitate their professional mobility and to enhance their individual and collective ability to ful l the needs of economies and of society”.