Discourses of excellence and the Teaching Excellence Framework 2017

Academics from the University of Birmingham take a closer look at the submissions that played a crucial role in universities’ rating for the Teaching Excellence Framework.

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is an evaluation of teaching quality at UK universities. First conducted in 2017, the TEF awards universities ratings of gold, silver or bronze for teaching quality. In its short life, the TEF has already come in for considerable criticism, both due to its ideological positioning in the context of market-based reforms to UK HE and due to statistical shortcomings as an evaluation exercise.

In this paper, we add to this growing critique of the TEF as a measure of teaching excellence by taking a closer look at the provider submissions that played a crucial role in universities’ TEF rating. We conducted a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the 2018 TEF provider statements (228 statements; 1,742,438 words) in an attempt to unearth the implied discourse of 'teaching excellence' in the TEF. We followed this up with a comparative reading of the 2019 TEF provider statement re-submissions to track the development of this discourse.

We found that, in the TEF, ‘teaching excellence’ is construed as students developing their employability and, eventually, gaining employment. It is anticipated that, in future, university discourse around teaching quality will continue to be dominated by employability discourse (rather than discourse around, for instance, social goods, personal development or equity).

About the speakers

Dr Ben Kotzee is a senior lecturer in the School of Education and Director of Postgraduate Research at the University of Birmingham. He works on topics in the philosophy of education and focuses on applying insights from contemporary epistemology to questions regarding intellectual development.