Reclaiming the narrative of educational excellence despite the decline of educational gain

There was a time when enhancement was the sector’s watchword.

Under the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), concepts like educational gain captured the idea that universities should focus not only on assuring quality, but on improving it. Teaching enhancement funds, learning and teaching strategies, and collaborative initiatives flourished. Today, that language has all but disappeared. The conversation has shifted from enhancement to assurance, from curiosity to compliance. Educational gain has quietly declined, not as an idea, but as a priority.

Educational gain was never a perfect concept. Like its cousin learning gain, it struggled to be measured in ways that were meaningful across disciplines, institutions, and student journeys. Yet its value lay less in what it measured than in what it symbolised. It represented a shared belief that higher education is about transformation: the development of knowledge, capability, and identity through the act of learning. It reminded us that the student experience was not reducible to outcomes, but highly personal, developmental, and distinctive.

Shifting sands

The shift from HEFCE to the Office for Students (OfS) marked more than a change of regulator; it signalled a change in the state’s philosophy, from partnership to performance management. The emphasis moved from enhancement to accountability. Where HEFCE invested in collaborative improvement, OfS measures and monitors. Where enhancement assumed trust in the professional judgement of universities and their staff, regulation presumes the need for assurance through metrics. This has shaped the sector’s language: risk, compliance, outcomes, baselines – all necessary, perhaps, but narrowing.

The latest OfS proposals on revising the Teaching Excellence Framework mark a shift in their treatment of “educational gain.” Rather than developing new measures or asking institutions to present their own evidence of gain, OfS now proposes removing this element entirely, on the grounds that it produced inconsistent and non-comparable evidence. This change is significant: it signals a tighter focus on standardised outcomes indicators. Yet by narrowing the frame in this way, we risk losing sight of the broader educational gains that matter most to students, gains that are diverse, contextual, and resistant to capture through a uniform set of metrics. It speaks to a familiar truth: “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

And this narrowing has consequences. When national frameworks reduce quality to a narrow set of indicators, they risk erasing the very distinctiveness that defines higher education. Within a framework of uniform metrics, where does the space remain for difference, for innovation, for the unique forms of learning that make higher education a rich and diverse ecosystem? If we are all accountable to the same measures, it becomes even more important that we define for ourselves what excellence in education looks like, within disciplines, within institutions, and within the communities we serve.

Engine room

This is where the idea of enhancement again becomes critical. Enhancement is the engine of educational innovation: it drives new methods, new thinking, and the continuous improvement of the student experience. Without enhancement, innovation risks becoming ornamental: flashes of good practice without sustained institutional learning. The loss of “educational gain” as a guiding idea has coincided with a hollowing out of that enhancement mindset. We have become good at reporting quality, but less confident in building it.

Reclaiming the narrative of excellence is, therefore, not simply about recognition and reward; it is about re-establishing the connection between excellence and enhancement. Excellence is what we value, enhancement is how we realise it. The Universitas 21 project Redefining Teaching Excellence in Research-Intensive Universities speaks directly to this need. It asks: if we are to value teaching as we do research, how do we define excellence on our own terms? What does excellence look like in an environment where metrics are shared but missions are not?

For research-intensive universities in particular, this question matters. These institutions are often defined by their research outputs and global rankings, yet they also possess distinctive educational strengths: disciplinary depth, scholarly teaching, and research-informed curricula. Redefining teaching excellence means articulating those strengths clearly, and ensuring they are recognised, rewarded, and shared. It also means returning to the principle of enhancement: a commitment to continual improvement, collegial learning, and innovation grounded in scholarship.

Compass point

The challenge, and opportunity, for the sector is to rebuild the infrastructure that once supported enhancement. HEFCE-era initiatives, from the Subject Centres to the Higher Education Academy, created national and disciplinary communities of practice. They gave legitimacy to innovation and space for experimentation. The dismantling of that infrastructure has left many educators working in isolation, without the shared structures that once turned good teaching into collective progress. Reclaiming enhancement will require new forms of collaboration, cross-institutional, international, and interdisciplinary, that enable staff to learn from one another and build capacity for educational change.

If educational gain as a metric was flawed, educational gain as an ambition is not. It reminds us that the purpose of higher education is not only to produce measurable outcomes but to foster human and intellectual development. It is about what students become, not just what they achieve. As generative AI reshapes how students learn and how knowledge itself is constructed, this broader conception of gain becomes more vital than ever. In this new context, enhancement is about helping students, and staff, to adapt, to grow, and to keep learning.

So perhaps it is time to bring back “educational gain,” not as a measure, but as a mindset; a reminder that excellence in education cannot be mandated through policy or reduced to data. It must be defined and driven by universities themselves, through thoughtful design, collaborative enhancement, and continual renewal.

Excellence is the destination, but enhancement is the journey. If we are serious about defining one, we must rediscover the other.