Baking an education culture

How is your higher education institution supporting research culture?

It is likely that most academics can answer this question, not least as their institution might have a research strategy which includes the development of researchers, making space for research time, and considers equity, diversity, and inclusion in research processes.

What if we ask the same about education? What is the strategy for supporting education culture at your institution? It is much harder to answer this question. Of course, there is work to enhance the student experience, or address APP targets, or improve NSS scores, but to what extent does your institution develop educators themselves in order to build education culture?

The missing ingredient

Building an education culture demands that we see educators as active and creative practitioners, yet support and development for this often receives limited resource.

One place where the lack of resource for building a dedicated education culture has an explicit impact is for colleagues who are on teaching-focused contracts. Colleagues in these roles regularly report feeling second class, with line managers lacking comprehension about their roles and their development trajectories, as commentary has attested before.

Nonetheless, there has been a huge growth in the number of education-facing academics across the UK, often in research-intensive universities. Yet, while vice chancellors and other senior leaders may talk about the importance of education and education-facing staff, the reality is that those in these roles see no translation of this “valuing” on the ground.

More broadly, research shows that many academics see active disincentives to build an education culture. In the 2026 Teaching Culture survey by Ruth Graham and Associates, only 26 per cent of academics agreed with the statement that time spent on university teaching has a positive impact on the career progression of academics.

Meanwhile, phrases such as “teaching buy-out” or “teaching relief”, when colleagues have other roles to undertake, are important signals to the value afforded to teaching – it is a burden to be lifted, or something that can be put to one side for anyone to pick up.

Education culture is like a cake

So how can we address the clear disconnects between sectoral attitudes to education-focused careers, education culture, and university teaching? We suggest it might be helpful to think of your institution as a cake.

We could envisage research culture as a clearly defined slice of that cake – often helpfully further “pre-sliced” in the form of REF Units of Assessment. Research is multi-dimensional, complex, and challenging. But outside of inter- or multi-disciplinary programmes, research often operates as islands of disciplinary excellence with researchers and research leaders focused only on their slice of the cake.

Innovation, social or civic responsibility, and knowledge exchange, might all constitute other slices. But this single slice of cake analogy doesn’t work for education culture. Where research culture can be articulated through specific slices of a university cake, education culture is everyone’s responsibility, and thus it functions more like a layer running through the whole institutional cake rather than something that can be neatly sliced.

This is because a strong education culture in an institution is composed of many factors, and all enrich and are enriched by the slices we have already defined, and cut across them all.

While there might be individually excellent lecturers, programmes, or departments, the experience of students is impacted by all who teach on their programme – including those teachers’ own slices of research – as well as the resources and facilities provided across the university from libraries and IT, to timetabling and space management, to welfare and support, partnership with the student union, and to the development of the staff. And importantly all these factors combine to create a sense of belonging and support learning for students in all disciplines and from all backgrounds. A positive and supportive education culture therefore is multifaceted, and institutional, not just cross-cutting the various slices of our cake that we might be tempted to delineate, but structuring and supporting the whole cake.

A supportive education culture

So how should the recipe for a supportive education culture read? To enable the construction of a cake with rich, cross-cutting layers, our recipe requires a holistic approach.

A foundational ingredient is recognition and reward for the breadth of teaching and learning, including the management and delivery of teaching and learning as distinct from support for the scholarship of teaching and learning. Within this, teaching and learning must be understood as a collaborative process, with collaborations existing between staff, parts of the university, and crucially, with students.

A further significant element of the cake is communities of practice, which are given space to support educators and enable the sharing of good practice across and beyond institutions. Teaching and learning continuous professional development is a cornerstone ingredient for all – the raising agent – with a programme of academic development connected to career level, rather than something that is only provided at induction.

Like all good recipes it needs to adapt to context; education culture is constantly evolving, not a single problem to be solved and a box to be ticked, underpinned by the recognition that people change, technologies change, the sector changes. A culture that is open to change, and to supporting its colleagues in these changes, is key.

Finally, a supportive education culture does not bake itself – it needs skilled cake makers, and education leaders are the most complex of HE cake-makers. They need to draw out the flavours that complement one another, cross-cutting every individual slice, building relationships between parts of the institution.

Our aim for this piece is to provide food for thought. In short, teaching and learning has been framed as something to rate in metrics, to employ dedicated staff to deliver, to fix reactively. But we jeopardise our students, our teaching staff, and the very foundations of our institutions if we underestimate the complexities of education culture. Baking the education culture that we aspire to is proactive; it is complex, holistic and, like all good recipes, needs care and thought.