The Nursing School of Coimbra (ESEnfC) hosted the plenary meeting of the Coordinating Council of the Polytechnic Higher Institutes (CCISP).
In this meeting, the CCISP received the members of the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Agency, presided by Professor Alberto Amaral, who stated his conviction that the courses offered by the subsystem operate with quality.
The new Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Agency will start evaluating the courses in the next academic year (2009/2010).
In the facilities of the ESEnfC, the members of the CCISP also received the visit of the General Director of Higher Education, Professor Morão Dias, with whom they discussed the process of the reception of the enrolment forms for access to higher education which is no longer conducted in the old educational area centres and is now under the responsibility of the higher education institutions.
According to the President of the CCISP, Professor João Alberto Sobrinho Teixeira, the polytechnic higher institutes will provide the necessary technical and human resources for the process and the online enrolment will make it faster. In this meeting of the CCISP, among other issues, the planning of the next Conference on Polytechnic Education, which will take place next May in Lisbon, was also discussed.
Professor João Teixeira, also the President of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, states that it will be a “moment of reflection and affirmation of the polytechnic subsystem, which represents almost half of the public higher education system in Portugal”.
This conference will have the presence of the presidents of the associations of universities of applied sciences, a designation which is currently being adopted among the polytechnic institutions at a European level.
