On 24 November 2008, the Minister of Education and Science approved the Concept for Quality Assurance in Formal Education. The purpose of the Concept is to provide a conceptual framework for political and social arrangements regarding the understanding of education quality and methods for quality assurance in formal education, as well as to create preconditions for harmonisation of the quality assurance policy in education.

Quality assurance in formal education is understood as an analysis of the overall education system, its components and interrelations to determine to what extent the fields under evaluation comply with the quality requirements or conceptual understanding of quality assurance in formal education. It also includes collection of relevant data necessary for undertaking other functions of evaluation: revealing, understanding and explaining the formal education processes, encouraging and teaching providers of formal education to work better, providing arguments for the new goals of formal education and improvement of its quality, gathering information about the activities of formal education providers, creating conditions for the transparency of these activities, and reporting on the work carried out.

In Lithuanian institutions of early childhood and school education and also formal adult education, evaluation processes are undertaken at the level of the evaluation of educational institutions (external evaluation and self-evaluation of their quality assurance) and at the level of the individual teacher evaluation (appraisal of teachers and school heads). 

In higher education institutions, evaluation processes cover the external evaluation of higher education institutions’ activities, evaluation of study programmes and evaluation of research and artistic production (activities).