ABSTRACT
For more than half a century, the Council of Europe has sought to improve the quality of language education in its member states by producing a large number of discussion papers, guides and instruments, and publishing recommendations. The organization’s foundational document, the European Convention on Human Rights (1950), recognizes the individual’s right to education, and in 2012 the Committee of Ministers adopted a recommendation on quality education. As the preamble to the recommendation argues, “the right to education can only be fully exercised if the education is of adequate quality”. This chapter explores the Council of Europe’s human rights approach to language education, the implications this has for the pursuit of quality in language education, and the complex of tasks involved in bringing reality into line with rhetoric. It concludes that effective quality assurance, in education as in other domains, depends on the appropriate distribution of responsibilities across all participants in the process: ministries, administrative authorities, schools and colleges, teachers, and learners.
