How do universities make sure teaching is excellent?

UK universities are world leaders in teaching, and the reputation of our higher education system demonstrates this. This isn’t an accident, or because UK universities are somehow naturally better than others. It’s because of the way the system has evolved over time to put in place mechanisms to continuously improve quality, backed by data, sector-wide systems and regulatory oversight.

Upholding quality doesn’t happen without work – but few people outside our sector have any real understanding of how this happens.

In England, universities are regulated for quality by mostly being measured against baselines. These baseline levels of quality are set by the OfS, who regulate universities, to make sure all students can expect to receive a minimum level of quality.

But in a high performing sector, universities are always thinking about what they can do not just to meet these minimum expectations, but to go far beyond them.

One of the ways that universities can and do demonstrate this constant and systematic effort to improve is through the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

The TEF, run by the Office for Students (OfS) in England and working on a four-year cycle, provides a helpful structure for universities to reflect on their performance.

After scrutiny by external TEF panellists, who also consider student submissions and any other relevant data, universities are able to benchmark themselves against other providers on the standard of teaching at their university.

Each university receives an overall rating for their undergraduate teaching, and then a component rating for student outcomes and another for student experience. This allows them to judge where their strengths are and possible areas for improvement, as well as providing a more contextualised approach to assessing quality, which recognises the differences between institutions.

The awards can also help students access information on universities when they’re making decisions about going to university. However, while the awards are a useful source of information, they’re not a substitute for course-specific information that can be accessed through a university itself.

The TEF awards will also be based on historic data and only updated every four years, so a word of caution is that they may not represent the current context of a university.

Crucially, the TEF is about excellence. To participate in the TEF, all universities will have demonstrated that they meet the already high minimum baselines for quality set by the OfS. These minimum standards include the quality of their courses, the quality of their student support, and the proportion of students completing their course and then progressing to professional and managerial careers.

In some cases, a university may not be judged to be excellent across enough of their courses to receive an award, and so will receive a note of ‘requires improvement’. This would indicate that while they are high quality, there is potentially more that they could do in specific areas. Others will receive awards of gold, silver, or bronze. The gold award indicates outstanding performance.

We’ve been supportive of the TEF as a tool to support enhancement and, as explained, it can be incredibly useful in helping universities to improve their teaching.

But as a compulsory exercise for all higher education providers on the OfS register with more than 500 undergraduate students, after this current cycle, it will be important for the higher education sector to be able to feed back on how they feel the process went. This should include feedback on how much burden was created by the exercise.

One member reported to us that they had four core staff members working full-time for three months to complete only their TEF submission. While it’s important to engage in this kind of exercise properly, the OfS needs to avoid the TEF becoming so burdensome that it detracts attention away from the activities that are more likely to actually drive improvement for students. We welcome the OfS committing to an evaluation of TEF in its most recent business plan.

The TEF has its strengths, but also limitations. What’s crucial is that all students are making informed decisions about their education, with the best possible information at hand. The higher education sector recognises that the TEF awards are an important part of this. However, these results should not be viewed out of context, or seen as the only marker of a course’s quality or success.

As with all regulation, we're supportive of fair and proportionate regulators which listen to higher education providers. The awards published this week will be a testament to this and the hard work of staff and students in making our universities centres of higher education excellence.