Best Measures of Teaching Excellence

Implementation of the teaching excellence framework

There are now more students entering Higher Education (HE) in the United Kingdom than ever before. HE is no longer limited just to the privilege of the elite few but where one in three school leavers continue to study at university level (Kershaw, 2019). With the changes in the early 1990s that created the post-1992 modern universities, the number of institutions with the title ‘university’ has also increased dramatically to now well over one hundred in the United Kingdom.

In many countries across the world the cost of HE is expensive with students having acquired a huge debt by the end of their programme that ultimately must be repaid. In the United States, for instance, typically, one year in a private university can cost around $30,000 when all costs are accounted for. In the United Kingdom, student debts are now averaging around £35,000 which is expected to be paid back but only when graduates are earning above a certain threshold amount and they do not have to make any repayments if they are out of work or their income goes below the threshold level.

In the United Kingdom, the government, as part of its reforms of the HE sector, placed a greater emphasis on giving students more choices about their options for HE. Where previously there was a general lack of information for students regarding the quality of teaching within an institution, students were not able to make informed choices regarding the suitability of a university for their needs, now information is available in the form of league tables and Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) awards.

Variability related to teaching activities within different institutions is high and has meant that some students only receive a few hours of actual teaching contact time on a weekly basis compared to other students that have a significantly higher number of hours of contact per week while studying the same course in another location. Students entering HE need to make important decisions regarding what and where to study.

The UK government considers that the best way these choices can be made by students is to have a framework that can gather information which measures teaching in the broadest possible way. As previously discussed, this is comparable to the Research Excellence Framework (REF).