Development Monthly | #37 November 2024 | Pathways to Progress: Career Development in HE
One of the most compelling aspects of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is the holistic view it takes to the student learning experience. The exercise provides an opportunity for institutions to reflect on the many aspects that feed into the quality of what they deliver for their students.
– Rebecca
Crucially, the 2023 TEF includes the role of staff, their development and their practice as one of seven features centred around the student experience. While QAA’s analysis found that the feature was one which providers struggled to successfully link back to teaching and learning (a key criteria needed for high ratings), the exercise itself did compel providers to think about how their professional development of staff contributes to the learning experience and provides an array of excellent examples from providers who did this well in their submissions.
– Helena
Evaluating Excellence: TEF 2023 Submission and Panel Statement Analysis
For starters, the TEF submissions tell us that staff professional development and academic practice are taken seriously by providers. It was the feature of excellence they performed second best on, and this was achieved in no small part through the time and resource that has been dedicated to this area over recent years. The submissions displayed a growing recognition of the importance of teaching alongside research, and the increased requirement of explicit certification or accreditation for staff members directly engaged in teaching.
However, QAA’s analysis also found that the ratings awarded for this feature were more weakly correlated with the overall rating a provider received than other features and the exercise itself revealed the disappointingly limited data sets we have underpinning this aspect of the learning experience. While each provider will have access to data about their own staff, at sector level the only source we really have is the HESA staff record. We can use this to look at the proportion of academics that have teaching qualifications but there’s no equivalent data on professional development for non-academic staff (and in fact, in England and Northern Ireland, no obligation to return any data at all about non-academic staff).
But what the submissions’ qualitative data does reveal is a compelling depiction of the broad range of staff who make the learning experience what it is. Many submissions spoke of a spectrum of staff roles integral to learning and therefore, why their development is so pivotal to delivering a high-quality experience. Staff directly involved in teaching (hereby referred to as “educators” for brevity) were inevitably prominent in these sections, but technicians, librarians, research students, professional services and academic development staff all feature as well.
“The Technicians play a pivotal role in delivering an outstanding student experience and enhancing student outcomes in a diverse range of disciplines from the arts and humanities to the sciences and engineering and support for the ed-tech ecosystem.” – Coventry University
“This scheme also recognises the contributions of a wide range of staff who support teaching and learning or student experience, including learning technologists, librarians, and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) tutors, as part of their professional recognition and development.” – The University of Kent
The many roles involved in the learning experience was clear not only in the feature considering professional development, but in the features where non-educators are more likely to interact with the student experience. For example, library staff were mentioned prominently in the features concerning resources and academic support, as were pastoral staff and those whose roles were predominantly concerned with the wellbeing of the students as well as their academic achievement.
Recognition and progression
One of the main points that providers were keen to emphasise in their submissions was the steps being taken to put education and teaching-focused roles onto equal footing with those more research intensive roles. Although initiatives were often in their infancy, many discussed at length the pathways available to a wide spectrum of staff.
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