The AESOP Excellence in Education Board is inviting AESOP member institutions to apply for the AESOP's Quality Recognition programme. The Quality Recognition (QR) programme is a voluntary programme of mutual learning and continual support within the AESOP community, which aims to recognise and promote the quality of individual planning programmes delivered by AESOP member institutions.
The QR process encompasses a range of opportunities for participating institutions:
- Engaging in critical dialogue with EEB members about the programme's curriculum distinctiveness, planning perspectives, themes/contents, skills development and institutional/programme settings.
- Fostering an ethic of quality enhancement amongst the programme's staff.
To make an application please visit the ‘How to Apply’ page, in order to learn more about the application process. The deadline for applications for the 2026-27 programme is 23:59 CET on Monday 21st December 2026.
To be eligible for QR, programmes must be planning programmes, as defined by AESOP’s Core Curriculum and must have been delivered in full at least once.
Each academic year since 2019, members of the Excellence in Education Board have been working with QR applicants to recognise planning programmes’ distinctiveness, principles of pedagogy, and best practices. The Certificates of Quality awarded to different planning programmes to date, together with their Evaluation Reports, have been published on the AESOP Digital Archive and give a sense of the variety of pedagogical practices and arrangements that can characterise a high quality planning programme . In addition, the 2023-2026 EEB published the AESOP Quality Recognition Catalogue 2019 – 2025: Sharing Excellence in Planning Education in July 2026, presenting best practices in European planning education, as identified from QR applications since 2019.
In late October an online session will be organised to present the QR process and answer any questions from potential applicants. This will be advertised on the AESOP website and will be recorded.
If you have any questions about QR, whether about the process or the application, please contact the EEB Chair, Dr Christopher Maidment at
We look forward to your contributions to a growing community of colleagues sharing the qualities of planning programmes across Europe.
