Create or crumble is no way to run a promotion system

Teaching-focused academics across the UK are increasingly evaluated on their capacity for “innovation” and “creation”.

Yet within many promotion frameworks, these terms remain conceptually unclear, unevenly applied, and difficult to evidence consistently.

The result is a growing tension where academics are expected to show continual novelty and “scale” in their teaching practice, while the criteria for what counts as innovation stay ambiguous.

This tension matters because teaching-focused roles have expanded significantly over the past decade, alongside sector-wide efforts to professionalise teaching through frameworks such as the Advance HE Professional Standards Framework. Despite this, promotion criteria for these roles often lack the clarity long associated with research metrics.

Working in academia is both wonderful and taxing. The wonder lies in nurturing minds and helping people reach their academic goals. But there are burdens placed on academics that go well beyond those wonders, and one of the sharpest lies in promotion – where academics must make a case for why and how they’re meeting the criteria for the next tier.

Research-focused academics have clearer ground to stand on; that clarity has even generated its own pejorative: publish or perish. Teaching-focused academics (TFAs) face a different bind, one I’ve taken to calling “create or crumble” – a phrase that’s been circling my mind as a TFA.

This article sets out the innovation dimension of promotion criteria for TFAs and why it becomes harder to satisfy as the years go on.

Promotion and creation

Across UK institutions, teaching-focused pathways – often termed Education and Scholarship, Teaching and Learning, or Education-Focused tracks – typically require evidence across three broad areas: teaching quality, educational leadership, and pedagogical development.

While the specifics vary, many frameworks emphasise “innovation,” “enhancement,” or “transformative practice” at higher grades. Unlike research metrics, which benefit from standardised indicators such as publications, grants, and citations, these terms are rarely defined in operational ways.

Similar activities may therefore be read very differently by promotion panels across departments or institutions, raising real questions about consistency, fairness, and sustainability for TFAs.

Some words recur with striking regularity in the promotion criteria for TFAs at my institution. Across the three criteria outlined for education alone, the word “innovation” or some variation of it appears 12 times, and “creating” appears twice – with one instance implying that a policy must be created for wider academia beyond the institution.

At lecturer level, innovation and creation appear as markers of higher performance, suggesting they’re optional. From senior lecturer to professorial level, however, they become non-negotiable.

The problem for many TFAs is that innovation can be quite esoteric in scope, ranging from incorporating evidence-based approaches into teaching to creating a policy that extends beyond your own institution. These “innovations” are tiered – a lecturer isn’t expected to create policy, but is expected to innovate their curriculum in some way – yet there’s little clarity about whether this means evidence-based practice or some more iconoclastic individual endeavour.

The issue, then, is not innovation itself, but the expectation of continual, individualised innovation without clear definition, shared standards, or agreed benchmarks.

While it’s true that policy requires updating and implementing where appropriate, it’s worth asking: to what extent does the pressure for promotion drive policy for policy’s sake? That’s a question I can’t answer definitively, but it raises a real concern about where constant innovation and creation could take us – both within our institutions and as individuals.

Inventing the shipwreck

One way to understand this pressure is through the philosopher Paul Virilio’s idea of speed. Virilio argued that technological and social systems increasingly prioritise acceleration without fully accounting for the consequences – captured in his observation that “when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck.” Progress carries inherent risk.

In higher education, the drive for continual innovation can produce a similar dynamic. When novelty becomes an expectation rather than a response to need, teaching risks becoming a cycle of constant reinvention. There’s a scramble to present innovative strategies in the face of financial pressure and student recruitment challenges, with practices introduced, replaced, and rebranded at pace – sometimes without the time or evidence needed to evaluate whether they work.

If the wheel is constantly being reinvented, you end up with a hexagonal prism, then a cube, and eventually you’re going nowhere. The need for innovation in promotion risks becoming a superficial exercise. Either “innovation” refers to using evidence-based methods – possible consistently, but not particularly novel – or it means creating something entirely new, which can’t be executed reliably without running the risk of that cubed wheel.

The argument here isn’t against innovation itself, but against the conditions under which it’s demanded. If academics must continually produce “the new,” innovation risks becoming performative – valued for its appearance rather than its impact.

Removing the expectation of unclear “innovation” from TFAs at lecturer, senior lecturer, and associate professor levels would produce a better system, one that places greater weight on collaboration than on perceived iconoclasm. Academia tends to work better when built on shared pillars than on the pillar of one – a structure that will eventually crumble under its own weight.

A better way

Working collaboratively, we can improve our institutions because they’re the home we all inhabit. Without a shift in how promotion criteria are framed, “innovation” risks becoming not a marker of excellence but a performative, fruitless cycle – one that leaves TFAs striving to create endlessly or quietly crumbling under the weight of it.

Rather than making innovation and creation a cyclical and empty process, we should aim to innovate in response to need, not to unclear systems. Collaboration is our strongest tool; let’s use it to build a better experience for students, for ourselves, and for our institutions.