Should all who teach in higher education be “excellent”?

Universities regularly assert their commitment to teaching excellence. Yet across the sector, many modules are delivered by staff with very different roles, priorities and strengths.

On a single module, students may encounter an excellent educator who carefully designs learning and scaffolds complexity, alongside a research or clinically-focused specialist whose primary aim is to share deep disciplinary expertise.

Both matter. But together, they can produce uneven learning experiences.

Inconsistency

Student feedback increasingly reflects this tension. One contributor is praised for clarity, structure and support, while another is perceived as disorganised or inaccessible. Students experience this not as a rational division of labour, but as inconsistency. They do not distinguish between professional identities, workload allocation or promotion criteria, they experience the module as a whole.

Universities have long assumed that subject expertise translates naturally into effective teaching. Evidence and experience suggests otherwise. Teaching is a craft requiring time, reflection and development. At the same time, institutions depend heavily on colleagues whose primary identity lies in research, clinical practice or industry. Their contribution is invaluable, but without support and alignment, expertise can be experienced by students as overload rather than enrichment.

This raises a fundamental question: should all who teach in higher education be excellent teachers? Or are we asking the wrong thing of the wrong people?

It takes a village

A growing alternative is to rethink teaching as a collective endeavour rather than an individual performance. In practice, student experience is shaped by teams of staff and in some cases by contributions of PGR’s. Also by how modules are designed, how contributions align, and how learning builds across programmes. Expecting every individual academic to demonstrate excellence in the same way may be unrealistic and unnecessary. What students need is not uniformity, but coherence.

In this team-based paradigm, different strengths are intentionally combined. Education-focussed staff bring expertise in learning design, assessment, inclusive practice and the shaping of learning journeys over time. Research and clinically-focused colleagues bring disciplinary authority, authenticity and insight into the frontiers of knowledge and practice. Excellence emerges not from individual brilliance, but from alignment.

For this to work, strong module and programme leadership is essential. Effective module leaders design coherent learning journeys, set shared expectations for contributors, and ensure assessment and feedback are consistently framed. At programme level, leadership ensures that knowledge and skills build over time, reducing the sense of unpredictability that students often describe in feedback.

Organisation, and fairness

This kind of alignment is increasingly central to how teaching quality is judged. NSS responses reflect students’ perceptions of clarity, organisation and fairness. TEF places growing emphasis on educational provision that delivers equitable outcomes, not just pockets of excellence. Where variability is unmanaged, it disproportionately disadvantages students with less educational capital, undermining continuation, attainment and progression.

Crucially, a collective model of excellence must value different academic identities equally. Education-focused staff often carry responsibility for integrating teaching, mediating expertise and supporting students, this work can be invisible and under recognised. Specialist colleagues, meanwhile, can feel unfairly judged against pedagogical expectations misaligned with their role. Neither experience supports sustainable teaching cultures.

Strong leadership can change this dynamic. When roles are explicit and contributions clearly valued, education-focused and research or clinically-focused staff can work in partnership rather than tension. Students benefit most when staff feel respected for what they bring, not scrutinised for what they do not.

But what about teacher development?

If teaching is increasingly delivered by teams, then professional development in education cannot remain focused almost exclusively on individuals.

Much of the sector’s investment in teaching development assumes a solo practitioner model: the individual academic attending a course, completing a qualification, or improving their personal teaching practice in isolation. While this has value, it sits uneasily alongside the reality of modern curriculum delivery, where student experience is shaped far more by how teaching teams work together than by any single contributor.

Evidence from team‑based teaching and professional learning suggests that the greatest gains in teaching quality often come not from improving individual performance alone, but from improving collective practice. When teaching teams engage in shared professional development, focused on curriculum design, assessment alignment, inclusive practice and pedagogical intent, coherence improves, variability reduces, and students experience a clearer, more equitable learning journey.

This is particularly important in modules taught by a mix of education‑focussed and research‑ or clinically‑focussed staff. Expecting each individual to independently reach the same level of pedagogical expertise is neither realistic nor necessary. What matters is that teams develop shared understandings, shared approaches, and shared responsibility for how learning is designed and supported.

On the team

Team‑based professional development shifts the emphasis from individual deficit to collective capacity. It legitimises different roles within the teaching ecosystem, while creating space for mutual learning: specialists gain confidence in how their expertise fits pedagogically, and education‑focussed colleagues gain insight into how disciplinary depth can be most effectively integrated for students.

Crucially, this approach aligns far more closely with what students experience. Students do not encounter teaching practice in isolation; they encounter modules and programmes. Investing in team‑based development recognises this reality and supports the kind of consistency, clarity and fairness that underpin positive student experience, continuation and outcomes.

For universities serious about teaching quality at scale, the question is no longer simply how to develop excellent individual teachers, but how to support excellent teaching teams. Without this shift, institutions risk continuing to evaluate individuals for problems that are, at their core, systemic and collective.

What happens next?

Universities must invest explicitly in pedagogical leadership at module and programme level. Coherence does not emerge organically when teaching is distributed across multiple contributors; it has to be intentionally designed, led and sustained.

Institutions should be more transparent with students about the different roles academics play in their learning. Variation in teaching contributions is inevitable in team‑taught modules, but when this variation is unacknowledged it feels arbitrary rather than purposeful.

Pedagogical development should be proportionate and role‑aware. Not every contributor requires or realistically has the capacity for the same depth of pedagogical expertise. What matters is that teams collectively meet expectations for quality, inclusion and clarity.

Universities must properly recognise and reward the integrative labour that underpins a coherent student experience. The work of aligning contributions, mediating expertise and supporting students’ sense‑making is central to teaching quality, yet too often remains invisible.

And institutions should design relentlessly for student outcomes rather than individual heroics. In a regulatory and reputational landscape shaped by NSS and TEF, reliance on individual goodwill is no longer sufficient. Teaching excellence at scale depends on systems, leadership and teams not isolated performance.

The challenge is not choosing between the excellent educator and the expert specialist. It is building educational systems that allow different strengths to combine into something greater than the sum of their parts. Teaching excellence, at scale, is not an individual attribute, it is a collective responsibility.