Dear Colleague,
Not surprisingly, the Green Paper has triggered widespread debate across the higher education sector and beyond. The renewed focus on learning and teaching has been broadly welcomed as too has the emphasis on social mobility and the achievement of minority groups. However, serious concerns have emerged about the challenges of introducing a robust teaching excellence framework (TEF) which has the confidence of students and other stakeholders within the proposed timeframe. Universities themselves struggle to define objective measures of teaching excellence and while some progress has been made in recent years, discussions on how best to recognise, evaluate and reward excellence in teaching and enhancing the broader educational experience of students through the promotion process are all too often fraught with difficulties. That of course is not a reason for not developing a TEF; to the contrary, the development of robust measures of educational excellence would be a very positive development. But it is a reason for proceeding with caution, for seeking out good practice across the sector in the UK and internationally, for drawing on the expertise of the PSRBs which accredit many of our courses and for thinking creatively how best we might develop a rigorous framework which has the confidence of the sector and its various stakeholders.
The UK has led the world in the evaluation of research performance with the REF and its predecessor, the RAE. The Green Paper opens the door for the development of a comparable ‘gold standard’ for the evaluation of teaching and the students’ broader learning experience which would again put the UK at the forefront internationally and help to secure our future as a world leading provider of higher education in the face of growing competition from both established western markets and the growing cadre of quality institutions in the developing world. But a gold standard TEF will take time to establish. The basket of measures must embrace the diversity of sector and the complexity of a university education in which teaching is a key part, but by no means the only part, of a transformational learning experience which instils the knowledge, skills and attitudes our students need to succeed in their future careers and play their part in enabling economic growth and social prosperity. And those measures must be piloted and rigorously evaluated and before being accepted, refined or rejected on basis of firm evidence. It is no mean task, but anything less than a gold standard would be detrimental to our students, our institutions and our world renowned HE sector.
Julia Buckingham
Vice-Chancellor, Brunel University
Full update available in PDF below.