‘Don’t split TEF and REF’

Responses to the government’s green paper on higher education say that the reforms could create an artificial divide between teaching and research. Rachel Hall reports.

Fifteen institutional responses seen by Research Fortnight warn of a range of unintended consequences of the government’s proposed higher education reforms, such as the risks associated with separating the Teaching Excellence Framework from its research counterpart. Several of the responses say that the schedule for implementing the reforms is unfeasibly tight.

The green paper proposes that the first stage of the TEF be rolled out in 2017-18, which would allow universities with a recent successful quality assurance review to raise their fees in line with inflation. A subsequent iteration of the TEF—to be based on a basket of metrics including degree outcomes, student retention rates and student satisfaction—would lead to a four-tier fee system.