Abstract
The quality assurance systems in European higher education have been receiving great attention in recent years. Britain is one of the European countries with the most profound history and the most complicated and diverse quality assurance systems in higher education. After 1997, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) was established to provide an integrated quality assurance service for Britain higher education, the system ushered a new era. Especially, since 2002-2003, the institutional audit in England replaced universal subject review, and institutional-level review. It was a new frame to ensure the effectiveness of an institution’s internal quality assurance structures and mechanisms. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore new developments in the quality assurance system of higher education in Britain, focusing on the practice of institutional audit by the QAA. In order to achieve this objective, this paper is organized into five sections. The first section presents an introduction. The second section reviews the historical development of quality assurance systems in Britain. The third and fourth sections explain the practice of institutional audit and analyze its characteristics and problems respectively. In the last section, the inspirations and suggestions to the development of Taiwan’s evaluation system in higher education are given.