To call, as John Blake does, for a renewed focus on teaching and pedagogy in higher education – and for the use of funding and regulatory systems to do this – is to return to the orthodoxy of the past 30 years of higher education policy.
The landscape is strewn with attempts to use regulatory and funding levers to drive up the quality of teaching at universities and other higher education providers.
Arguably, if there was a clean read-across to other modes of education, it would have happened by now. The assessment of the quality of provision in schools has recently undergone yet another convulsion – pivoting away from the reductive single word judgements that the new teaching excellence framework seems to want to bring about.
History lesson
In England the 1990s brought the quality wars and the normalisation of a nationalised system of inspections – initially of teaching directly, and latterly of the institutional systems that oversaw quality and standards.
The new century brought a growing emphasis on teaching quality enhancement – itself a recommendation of the Dearing review – and the beginnings of a long retreat from quality assessment. Enhancement support began firstly via the funding of interventions in areas of acknowledged weakness (the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, or FDTL), and then the support of systems that supported higher education teachers in developing their own practice.
From there we moved to the implementation of Michael Barber’s “beacon school” model via the insanely expensive Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and the promotion of teaching fellowships and awards linked to a set of national professional standards.
The 2010s saw a retreat from rewarding and supporting excellence, and a return to baseline measures. Two attempts to implement direct measures of learning gain (most notably via the trial of a national examination) came to nothing, so we relied on indirect measures (the familiar “output measures” of continuation, completion, and progression) plus the consumer-facing National Student Survey.
Three quarters of the way through the decade this morphed into an emphatically market-based approach, in parallel with a hugely expanded market – signals like the Teaching Excellence Framework, composed of multiple metrics, would drive applicants and students to choose better quality. And, as that approach bedded in, it became increasingly apparent that a new market focused regulator could use those same metrics to “pick losers”, investigating institutions where the numbers failed to add up or other reports compelled them to.
The needle has spun from direct assessment of teaching quality, through to seeing quality as something managed and supported by institutions, and onward to seeing quality as the causal factor in student outputs.
Autonomy for the people
Those who defend the current status quo usually point to two contributory factors to our lack of alternatives. The first is familiar from the quality wars – institutional autonomy to determine the most appropriate means of teaching and assessing your students. Though institutional autonomy itself can be seen here as a conduit for academic freedom, academics themselves would be unlikely to welcome, or their students benefit from, a government-directed approach to teaching and assessment.
The factor second points to the sheer diversity of higher education: can teaching chemistry undergraduates at Bristol how to write up an experiment really have anything in common with teaching students at Backstage Academy how to fly a speaker array? On one level, we are absolutely looking at the effective and efficient transfer of knowledge and skills – that’s a given – but on another the methods, approaches, and assumptions are widely different.
Both factors are proxies for the wider question of whether it is possible to define what “quality teaching” actually is. Most teacher facing definitions talk about the ability to deploy a range of teaching strategies, or critical reflection on teaching practice, or supporting other teachers in doing either – all laudable stuff, but difficult to apply directly to the quality of the student experience.
Without any concept of what excellent teaching actually is, the best we can do is use either the proxy measures that Blake describes as “inadequate for assessing teaching excellence,” or to rely on individual providers somehow having a handle on something you are unable to adequately describe (for example, via the attempts in the last TEF to crowdsource definitions of learning gain, or via assessing paperwork pertaining to the institutions own attempts to ensure high quality teaching).
Curriculum review
It’s not strictly a higher education problem, of course. At the compulsory level Ofsted mashes teaching into a “curriculum and teaching” evaluation area that is far more interested in whether the required curriculum is being taught rather than how it is taught. In the skills and further education end of tertiary education we see evaluation of curriculum, teaching, and training that again focuses on what is taught rather than how. While it is fair to argue that pedagogic choices are and should be determined by a curriculum, this approach does not and cannot offer a more general assessment of the quality of teaching that can be compared with other providers or settings.
But higher education, at a surface level, curriculum butts up against academic freedom, and therefore provider autonomy. It is not currently possible for government to play an active role in what is taught, and given the retreat from thinking about how it is taught it is unsurprising that we can only peer obliquely at consumer satisfaction and the outcome measures.
The professionals
There is, however, another way. At the very least one third of undergraduate programmes are accredited by a professional, statutory, or regulatory body (PSRB), the true figure for courses influenced by professional requirements is much higher. This covers a multitude of engagements – from a simple, provider level, certification through to in-depth compliance with an agreed curriculum. The common thread is that PSRBs are representative of the industry or community of practice to which the course in question nominally offers access to.
To say that current thinking about teaching quality in higher education ignores the work of the PSRBs is, as I’ve been over before, is an understatement. Some, but not all, have fed into a QAA Subject Benchmark processes that I feel sure OfS would ban if they remembered that they existed. There’s a nominal sense in which OfS and DfE do speak to PSRBs on occasion, but neither has ever been able to offer evidence, dates, or details. Indeed, during the pandemic restrictions the only way that the government could ensure that graduates could meet professional requirements was to ask the QAA to convene a meeting (like the subject benchmarks, a role that the QAA is not funded to perform).
In the absence of a definition of teaching (something that hasn’t emerged in the 30 years I have been involved in the sector, and shows little sign of emerging now) it is not hard to imagine some combination of PSRB accreditation (standards set by industry, with academics) and subject benchmark statements (standards set by academics, with industry) as a means of curriculum level regulation – with a third arm being the often-disparaged external examiner system offering additional assurance that what is being taught has academic and industrial credibility.
All of these things would need to be improved from their current state of neglect (benign or otherwise) in order to serve an assurance purpose. But as a way to have at least some confidence that what universities are teaching is what industry needs and that curricula are comparable, trusting these communities of practice has a lot to recommend it.
Once again an outsider he thinks he has found the magic bullet.
Subject benchmark statements (at least in my subject, which is the only one I can really properly judge) are incredibly vague. This is out of necessity: they should be applicable to programmes that teach some of the brightest minds in the country and to programmes which teach students who have very limited intellectual capabilities. Teaching (and curriculum design) is not “one size fits all”.
If you want to design national curricula for universities, then you would end up with a very large number of subject areas each at various different levels. This would calcify into an extremely rigid system.
Blake is right to push for a renewed focus on pedagogy, but we’ve been here before—cycling through regulatory fixes that never quite get to grips with what “quality teaching” actually looks like in practice. One thing we really shouldn’t lose sight of is the role of professional standards, particularly those developed by Advance HE, and the way they underpin serious academic development. Proper postgraduate certificates in academic practice—done well and properly supported—remain one of the most reliable ways of building teaching capability, and alongside these, Advance HE provides a trusted, evidence-based pathway for professional accreditation that gives real recognition to teaching expertise and development.
But this only works if institutions take it seriously. Too often, staff development and CPD are treated as peripheral rather than core business. University leaders need to invest in this consistently and visibly, not just pay lip service. If the TEF is going to mean anything, it ought to focus much more on how institutions actually develop their people and sustain a culture where teaching is valued, supported, and improved over time. Without that, we’re just rearranging the furniture again.
There is another answer that some of us have been promoting for some time (but so far ignored) and that is for subject communities, including PSRBs where appropriate, to take responsibility for calibrating the assessment decisions of teachers (and especially external examiners) in their discipline. This would establish standards across the sector, and also overcome Bobby’s observation about the vagueness of benchmark statements in clarifying what they truly mean.
PSRBs regularly over estimate their knowledge of what quality teaching is, and advocate for content and approaches that researchers have shown to be outdated.