As the new academic year dawns, there is a feeling of “back to the future” for the Teaching Excellent Framework (TEF).
And it seems that the Office for Students (OfS) needs to go “back to school” in its understanding of the measurement of educational quality.
Both of these feelings come from the OfS Chair’s suggestion that the level of undergraduate tuition fees institutions can charge may be linked to institutions’ TEF results.
For those just joining us on TEF-Watch, this is where the TEF began back in the 2015 Green Paper.
At that time, the idea of linking tuition fees to the TEF’s measure of quality was dropped pretty quickly because it was, and remains, totally unworkable in any fair and reasonable way.
This is for a number of reasons that would be obvious to anyone who has a passing understanding of how the TEF measures educational quality, which I wrote about on Wonkhe at the time.
Can’t work, won’t work
First, the TEF does not measure the quality of individual degree programmes. It evaluates, in a fairly broad-brush way, a whole institution’s approach to teaching quality and related outcomes. All institutions have programmes of variable quality.
This means that linking tuition fees to TEF outcomes could lead to significant numbers of students on lower quality programmes being charged the higher rate of tuition fees.
Second, and even more unjustly, the TEF does not give any indication of the quality of education that students will directly experience.
Rather, when they are applying for their degree programme, it provides a measure of an institution’s general teaching quality at the time of its last TEF assessment.
Under the plans currently being considered for a rolling TEF, this could be up to five years previously – which would mean it gives a view of educational quality at least nine years before applicants will graduate. Even if it was from the year before they enrol, it will be based on an assessment of evidence that took place at least four years before they will complete their degree programme.
Those knowledgeable about educational quality understand that, over such a time span, educational quality could have dramatically changed. Given this, on what basis can it be fair for new students to be charged the higher rate of tuition fees as a result of a general quality of education enjoyed by their predecessors?
These two reasons would make a system in which tuition fees were linked to TEF outcomes incredibly unfair. And that is before we even consider its impact on the TEF as a valid measure of educational quality.
The games universities play
The higher the stakes in the TEF, the more institutions will feel forced to game the system. In the current state of financial crisis, any institutional leader is likely to feel almost compelled to pull every trick in the book in order to ensure the highest possible tuition fee income for their institution.
How could they not given that it could make the difference between institutional survival, a forced merger or the potential closure of their institution? This would make the TEF even less of an effective measure of educational quality and much more of a measure of how effectively institutions can play the system.
It takes very little understanding of such processes to see that institutions with the greatest resources will be in by far the best position to finance the playing of such games. Making the stakes so high for institutions would also remove any incentive for them to use the TEF as an opportunity to openly identify educational excellence and meaningfully reflect on their educational quality.
This would mean that the TEF loses any potential to meet its core purpose, identified by the Independent Review of the TEF, “to identify excellence and encourage enhancement”. It will instead become even more of a highly pressurised marketing exercise with the TEF outcomes having potentially profound consequences for the future survival of some institutions.
In its own terms, the suggestion about linking undergraduate tuition fees to TEF outcomes is nothing to worry about. It simply won’t happen. What is a much greater concern is that the OfS is publicly making this suggestion at a time when it is claiming it will work harder to advocate for the sector as a force for good, and also appears to have an insatiable appetite to dominate the measurement of educational quality in English higher education.
Any regulator that had the capacity and expertise to do either of these things would simply not be making such a suggestion at any time but particularly not when the sector faces such a difficult financial outlook.
An OfS out of touch with its impact on the sector. Haven’t we been here before?
