Avaluació de la qualitat docent i promoció de professorat universitari

During the years of Francoism, the Spanish universities were regulated successively by three different acts: the Spanish Universities Act of 1943, the University Faculties and Lecturers Act of 1965, and the General Education Act of 1970. The procedures for selecting faculty members provided for in each of these included elements that permitted various aspects of the teaching quality of candidates to be evaluated; but throughout the period in which these laws were in force, there were no generally established practices for evaluating university lecturers, due to the reluctance among the faculty members to subject themselves to evaluation and to the persistence of the competitive examination system for acceding to a teaching post that was assured for life. During the early years of the transition to democracy, various attempts were made to introduce a law that might bring the organisation and the functions of the universities in line with the country’s new socio-political situation; but they were all to fail because of a lack of parliamentary support, until that is in 1983 when the socialist government introduced the University Reform Act. This law, which regulated life in Spain’s universities for almost twenty years, introduced new ideas in the evaluation of teaching quality in relation to the appointment and promotion of lecturers.