Teaching yet to achieve parity with research

The teaching excellence framework looks set to become ever more bureaucratic but lacks the teeth of its research-focussed counterpart.

Today’s papers

The lack of a direct link to funding means that the teaching excellence framework has not yet led to university teaching gaining the same status as research, I argue in Research Fortnight. Jo Johnson, the universities and science minister, wants to use the results of the exercise to enable different universities in England to charge different tuition fees. Because university teaching varies by course, this will necessitate a discipline-specific exercise. The Higher Education Funding Council for England is to pilot such a scheme for 2018. However the metrics on which the 2017 exercise were based have yet to be generated at the subject level and the project faces many challenges. Moreover the teaching excellence framework will need to be run every year while under development and certainly every three years once some stability is achieved. Given that the research excellence framework, run every six or seven years, costs £250 million, the exercise has the potential to become eye-wateringly expensive.