The educational developments inside the European Union during the last two decades have been following the guidelines of the Bologna Process (BP) towards a unified European Higher Education Area (EHEA, 1999). Since 2001 the social dimension of the BP has emerged and it is outlined as a crucial factor of decision making inside the EHEA policy context (EHEA, 2001; 2010; Kolokitha, 2022). At the same time the ever-changing socio-political environment, today more than ever, is highlighting the need for education to play a leading role towards o more fair society:

“The social dimension should interconnect the principles of accessibility, equity, diversity and inclusion into all laws, policies and practices concerning higher education in such a way that access, participation, progress and completion of higher education depend primarily on students’ abilities, not on their personal characteristics or circumstances beyond their direct influence.” (EHEA, 2020, p. 3)

That direct correlation of the social dimension of education, as the notion evolved through the ministerial declarations following the Bologna Process, with an educational context promoting social justice was the result of not only European but also Global discussions in the form of a ‘debate’ between two different approaches over the provision of HE, those of UNESCO and WTO (Barblan, 2002). Those discussions were summarized and connected to not only the ‘social dimension’ but also with another central BP guideline, that of Quality Assurance of Higher Education (Zgaga, 2019).

The Bologna Process, launched with the Bologna Declaration of 1999, is one of the main voluntary processes at European level, as it is nowadays implemented in 49 States, which define the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Every two years there are Ministerial Conferences organised in order to assess the progress made within the EHEA and to decide on the new steps to be taken. The European Students’ Union (ESU) has also been contributing to the review of the implementation of the Bologna Process since 2003, when it published the first Bologna With Student Eyes (BWSE) (EHEA, 2022). The designated stakeholder organisation of quality assurance agencies in the EHEA is the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), formerly known as the European Network for Quality Assurance in Higher Education. In Greece, at a national level, as a member of ENQA, the Hellenic Authority for Higher Education (HAHE) has been operating since 2006 with the mission “to ensure high quality in Higher Education” (HAHE, 2022). All the above stakeholders of the HE regularly publish reports in order to evaluate the progress of the process and recalibrate its course if that is the case.

The aim of the current research is to analyse those reports in order to examine the level up to which the current Quality Assurance framework of EHEA is contributing towards an education based on the principles of social justice.

For the purposes of this research a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) will be applied over the documented reports on the progress of the BP made by major HE stakeholders such as Ministerial Conferences, Students Union and the HAHE. Specifically we are going to apply the Critical Higher Education Policy Discourse Analysis Framework proposed by D. Hyatt in order to contextualise and deconstruct the QA policy (Hyatt, 2013). The contextualisation element of the framework comprises three parts: temporal context, policy levers and drivers, and warrant while the deconstructing element will use tools from CDA that will allow a ‘macro’ semantic and societal approach of the texts as well as ‘micro’ lexico-grammatical one.

Using CDA methodology this research is expected to reveal inner biases and claims inside the analysed documents in a systemic and structured way. Furthermore, the identification of new sub-discourses inside the main discourse may provide critical information that will facilitate more efficient and effective state action. Our main concern behind this work is not only to understand the current situation in QA policy but also to push it towards a more socially fair direction at the same time.

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