Accreditation of higher education institutions is a policy measure used to find a balance between their autonomy and public assurance concerning the quality of the qualifications they award. From the point of view of this balance of power, this text analyses the process of development of the Portuguese accreditation system aimed at providing public assurance that initial teacher education programmes were more driven by social demand, namely by the changing school education needs. This was a political and cultural process rather than a merely rational and technical one.The implementation of...