Jordan Puts 80% of University Degrees Inside National Framework

More than 80% of Jordan's university qualifications had been placed within the country's National Qualifications Framework (NQF, the system that classifies degrees against skills standards) by the end of 2025. AQAC President Dhafer Sarayreh announced the figure on Wednesday at the launch of a new curriculum design toolkit in Amman. The remaining programs will follow in 2026.

The Accreditation and Quality Assurance Commission (AQAC) developed the toolkit with the British Council and the UK's University of Strathclyde. Its purpose is narrow and practical: help universities align academic programs with the NQF and with labor market requirements.

What's the timeline behind the framework?

The NQF's path took nearly a decade. Sarayreh sketched the milestones:

• Cabinet approved the framework's development in 2019; work resumed in 2021.
• Universities and university colleges began applying for inclusion in 2022.
• Qualification placement progressed through 2023.
• In 2024, AQAC updated standards to cover general, higher, vocational, and technical education.
• In 2025, general education and vocational and technical training institutions began joining.

Sarayreh said the initiative aims to ensure academic programs equip graduates with the knowledge, skills, and competencies employers actually require.

How does the toolkit work in practice?

British Council Jordan Director Ruth Cocks described the toolkit as a "practical" link between education policy and classroom implementation. The partnership between the British Council and AQAC dates to 2019 and has supported exchange of Jordanian and British expertise, plus capacity building for the framework.

The toolkit gives academic leaders and faculty guidance on designing integrated, learning-outcome-based curricula that respond to students, employers, and society. Strathclyde experts Dr. Sean Morrissey and Professor Fiona Smart said it draws on three years of cooperation and on the university's BOLD curriculum design framework.

Its first phase involved roughly 25 Jordanian universities and 100 academics and higher education professionals. That phase focused on learning outcomes, assessment methods, teaching strategies, and practical curriculum design tools. A second phase brought academic teams from five Jordanian universities together to build more integrated program-design approaches.

The method aims to align programs with individual courses, connect learning outcomes to assessment and feedback, and cut repetitive assessments and unnecessary student workloads. Takeaway: less duplication for students, tighter links between what's taught and what's measured.

What does this mean for graduates?

For students, the toolkit's guidance covers backward curriculum design (starting from the outcomes a graduate must demonstrate), assessment for learning, feedback practices, and integrating technology and artificial intelligence into teaching. Institutions can use it both for new programs and for improving existing ones through periodic reviews and evaluation of student learning outcomes.

The Strathclyde experts framed the ambition plainly: move the NQF beyond quality assurance and qualification classification toward genuinely improving teaching, learning, and program design. With the last qualifications due for placement in 2026, Jordan's universities now hold a concrete instrument for turning framework compliance into curriculum reform that employers can see in graduate skills.