France's 2015 quality decree: the six criteria that paved the way for Qualiopi

Before Qualiopi, even before Datadock, there was a text: decree no. 2015-790 of 30 June 2015 on the quality of continuing vocational training. It is what brought quality into French training law, with six criteria that today’s entire system extends. The scheme no longer produces any effect — but anyone who wants to understand the requirements of 2026 will gain from knowing their founding text.

The context: 2014, quality becomes the funders’ business

The law of 5 March 2014 on vocational training, employment and social democracy made a decisive move: it made funders — the joint funding bodies, the State, the Regions, the public employment service, Agefiph (the disability-employment fund) — responsible for ensuring that the providers they financed could deliver quality training. Until then, access to the funded market rested essentially on the déclaration d’activité (registered training-provider declaration), an administrative formality with no real quality check.

That choice — regulating through funders rather than through State approval — is the heart of the 2015 system, and, as we shall see, its main weakness.

The six criteria of decree no. 2015-790

The decree, in force from 1 January 2017, set the criteria funders had to verify:

1. precise identification of the training’s objectives and its adaptation to the audience;
2. adaptation of intake, pedagogical follow-up and assessment arrangements to trainee audiences;
3. adequacy of pedagogical, technical and supervisory resources to the training offer;
4. professional qualification and continuing training of the staff delivering the courses;
5. conditions of public information on the offer, its access times and the results obtained;
6. taking into account the feedback given by trainees.

Read that list again: objectives, adaptation, resources, competence, information, listening to trainees. An organisation preparing Qualiopi in 2026 will immediately recognise the main families of indicators it documents today.

How the criteria were checked: two routes

The decree created neither a certification nor an auditor. It left organisations two ways to prove compliance:

• The declarative route, organised by the joint funding bodies from 2017 in a shared database, Datadock: 21 indicators breaking down the six criteria, backed by documents uploaded by the organisation and reviewed by the funders. The Datadock page details how it worked.
• The recognised-marks route: the CNEFOP (the national council for employment, training and vocational guidance) published the list of quality certifications and labels whose requirements covered the six criteria — notably ISO 9001, the OPQF qualification, and sector or regional labels. A listed mark carried a presumption of compliance, with no full new review. We tell that story in The CNEFOP lists: what did they recognise?.

The intuition behind the scheme — making quality visible so as to steer funding — is solidly documented by research. Ginger Jin and Phillip Leslie, in a study published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics on the display of restaurant hygiene grades in Los Angeles, showed that a simple quality-disclosure device improves both consumers’ choices and establishments’ actual practices. The 2015 decree made the same bet: informing funders would pull the market upwards.

Why the scheme was not enough

The 2015 system ran into three structural limits.

Documentary, scattered checks. Each funder remained the judge of compliance, with its own review practices: the same organisation could be treated differently depending on its counterpart, and nobody audited on site.

A mosaic of marks of unequal rigour. The CNEFOP list placed very different objects on the same footing — an international management standard, a professional qualification, regional labels — without guaranteeing a consistent level.

A declarative burden with no differentiation. Once nearly the whole market was “datadocked”, the referencing no longer told buyers anything: being compliant had become the norm, not a signal.

The law of 5 September 2018 drew the consequences: a single national framework — 7 criteria and 32 indicators, created by the decrees of 6 June 2019 — with checks entrusted to accredited third-party certifiers. Since 1 January 2022, Qualiopi certification has been the sole quality condition for access to public and pooled funds. The CNEFOP, for its part, had ceased activity in 2019, its missions taken over by the new governance, notably France compétences.

What the 2015 decree still teaches you in 2026

Today’s requirements have a genealogy. Every indicator you document for Qualiopi descends from one of the six criteria of 2015, enriched by two major additions: anchoring in the professional environment (monitoring, networks, subcontracting) and continuous improvement. Understanding that lineage helps you grasp the intent of the indicators rather than treating them as an arbitrary list — browse them on the Indicators page.

The regulatory direction is constant. From 2015 to today, each step has tightened control: declaration, then document review, then on-site audit. Betting on a rollback would be misreading ten years of history.

A file from that era has value. If your organisation went through Datadock or a CNEFOP-listed label, your procedures and evidence from that time, brought up to date, cover a substantial share of the current framework. Do not start from scratch.

Take action

To see the historical scheme as a whole — timeline, FAQ, free guide to download — visit the CNEFOP lists page. Then focus on the only procedure that matters today: self-assessment against the national quality framework, indicator by indicator.