Accreditation

Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications (HKCAAVQ) is a statutory body to provide accreditation services for program providers upon request. To be accredited, program providers have to go through a process called Four-Stage Quality Assurance Process. For QF levels 4-7 courses, this process takes a year to complete. Details of the process are summarized below:

After all necessary steps, the possible outcome will be approval, approval with pre-condition(s) and/or requirement(s) and non-approval. Where pre-condition(s) and/ or requirement(s) are stipulated, the fulfillment of the pre-condition(s) and/or requirement(s) within a specified timeframe is mandatory to obtain and to maintain valid accreditation status⁵¹. Even though the Quality Assurance Process is quite rigorous, the mechanism measures programs mostly measures the management capabilities of course providers and their ability to carry out the program aims set out by themselves. As a result, there is a great deal of variation in the course content and program objectives of the various programs, and even programs at the same QF level may differ in duration. To make matters more complicated, accreditation is not mandatory, so many local interior design programs has not undergone the Quality Assurance Process.