Let’s call the whole thing off

A University and College Union report calls for the Teaching Excellence Framework to be scrapped.

Higher education’s Research and Teaching Excellence Frameworks are unpopular with huge swathes of university employees. This is a given, and it would be the same in pretty much any industry—not many people outside the world of sport want to have their performance constantly rated, ranked and published for all to see.

This sentiment was reflected last month in the words of James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, when he bemoaned the fact that the name of the Knowledge Exchange Framework associates it with both the REF and the TEF, which have a reputation for being big and burdensome.