The European Standards and Guidelines for quality assurance are presented as a development in the Bologna Process. The standards and guidelines are like a matryoshka doll. At the outermost layer is the quality assurance of quality agencies, nested inside is the external quality assurance of institutions and/or programmes by those agencies and at the heart is the internal quality assurance within higher education institutions. After detailed consideration of the internal quality assurance standards, I relate my own agency's experience of being subject to agency review and reflect on the status of the standards and guidelines.