18th November 2016 1:00
By Blue Tutors
The Teaching Excellence Framework, or TEF, aims to promote excellent teaching that prepares students for the world of work, reward universities that welcome students from diverse backgrounds, and to shift the focus from research excellence to teaching in university rankings in order to provide prospective students with information on teaching quality and career opportunities so they can make an informed decision when choosing a university. The system has yet to come into effect, but the government has announced that the assessment will be in the form of ‘awards’, bronze, silver or gold, as opposed to an overall ranking. Critically, the TEF rating will determine whether an institution will be able to raise tuition fees in the coming years.
Although there is a feeling across the sector that the government’s focus on education standards and maintaining the quality of university education is a good idea in principle, there is a great deal of resistance to the TEF in its current form as a means of implementing any useful change. Oxford University’s response to the consultation was rather damning: “We are not convinced that, as currently conceived, the TEF will improve the quality of teaching across the sector.” Even before it has been published, the TEF has been branded as having little to do with teaching quality and no insight into how to improve things.
There has been criticism over what is included in the assessment and whether this really does provide a measure of teaching quality. For example, the ranking focusses on graduate outcomes, namely the proportion of graduates who are in a graduate-level job after leaving. This is, to some extent, out of the control of the University and does not reflect the quality of its teaching as much as its reputation with employers and the individual choices and backgrounds of its students. There is extensive data showing that an individual’s career prospects are shaped predominantly by social class, ethnicity, geographical location and subject choice, none of which are anything to do with teaching. The TEF will also include student satisfaction data from the National Student Survey and the drop-out statistics provided by institutions. As such, it relies heavily on the cooperation of universities and students.
However, many vice-chancellors are debating whether the potential gain of being able to increase tuition fees will offset the risk of reputation damage done by taking part in the TEF. Several leading institutions are boycotting the new metric, with only 6 of the 20 Russel Group universities taking part. The rest are potentially unwilling to provide the information the government needs in order to complete its assessment. Several leading intuitions, used to being at the top of the rankings lists, are predicted to fare badly. London universities in particular, penalised in student satisfaction data by high prices of accommodation and travel, are likely to be harmed by the ratings. What is more, with restrictions on international student numbers being imposed by the Home Office, universities like LSE, with a very high proportion of international students, are worried that the government may use the TEF to allocate or justify cutting international student places.
The National Union of Students (NUS) is also planning to oppose the system as it will enable further fee increases; they are organising a national boycott of the National Student Survey, whose results are used as part of the ranking process. Without sufficient respondents to the survey, the TEF will be “unworkable”. The vice-provost for education and student affairs at UCL praised the national survey for its role in improving student experience, but has reservations about the use of the survey in a ranking that is used to determine student fees. “There is a risk that this is going to drive a wedge between students and their institutions. They will feel their feedback isn’t being used to improve their experience, but as a vehicle to put their fees up.”
There is also fear that the introduction of the TEF will drives a wedge between teaching and research. The latter is already assessed using the research equivalent, the REF, to determine the allocation of government research funding to institutions. As it stands, academic progression is based almost entirely on research merit, which some say was aggravated by the REF’s focus on journal publications. The government wishes to use the TEF to “create a culture where teaching has equal status with research” so that teaching carries equal weight in the pursuit of academic career progression. Many in the sector argue that the introduction of the TEF will only aggravate the issue of casualisation within academia, with many researchers on insecure contracts that have been shown to negatively affect teaching quality and dropout rates. The introduction of another metric does not address this problem; it only gives young researchers another set of hoops to jump through and a longer journey to job security. It remains to be seen if this is the final straw that will see top academics leaving the UK.