In 2004, a regional Task Force on Teacher Education was established with responsibility for and oversight of the professional aspects of teacher educa­tion, as well as for quality assurance, accreditation and accountability in teacher education within the region. Since the accreditation system envisaged would build on the national systems of teacher education and accreditation, it was necessary to obtain documentation on these national systems-the practices and policies in current use in teacher education, and the issues that institutions face.

The work of the external examiner has been an integral part of quality monitoring activities of the Jamaican Joint Board of Teacher Education (JBTE) since its inception in the early 1960s. In recent years as the JBTE's approach to quality assessment has changed from one of monitoring to one of quality assurance, so too have the expectations for the role(s) its external examiners are expected to play. As with any attempts at educational and ad­ministrative reform, these changes bring challenges.

Quality has always been a major concern in higher education; in fact some accrediting agencies date back to the 1800s (Rhoades and Sporn 2002). Since the mid-1980s, issues of quality assurance have been raised in various coun­tries and international fora with increasing rapidity. Today there is an on­going international conversation about the quality of higher education and quality assurance in tertiary education worldwide.

The imperatives for the establishment of quality assurance mechanisms, and the need to create a culture of quality within higher education have been well established in the various debates on quality which have intensified since the 1980s.

This paper presents an overview of the model of quality assurance at The University of the West Indies (UWI) as developed by the Office of the Board for Undergraduate Studies (OBUS). “Fitness for purpose” is the definition of quality that informs the articulation and operationalization of the UWI model, and the authors engage in a critical examination of the processes involved. These processes include self-assessment, peer review, and site visits, and the follow-up of the recommendations of review reports.

Since its formation 1987, the University Council of Jamaica (UCJ) has not itself undertaken an institutional review of its processes and performance. With its mandate to accredit programmes and, more recently, institutions, the UCJ is expected to come under tighter scrutiny to ensure that its processes not only address the country’s education agenda but that the UCJ maintains its mandate and can be benchmarked against international standards of good practice. This paper reports on a brief survey undertaken among the staff and directors of the UCJ as well as institutions served by the UCJ.

The Caribbean tertiary landscape must inject the sine qua non of quality assurance in its daily operations to be in sync with world trends. This single statement largely constitutes the poto mitan of Anna Kasafi Perkins’ anthology Quality in Higher Education in the Caribbean. Her florilegium investigates a host of pioneering work on improving quality in the service of education.