left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

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One of the things that it has been interesting to watch, and be a part of, has been the changes in the debate over the role of teaching qualifications for staff delivering and supporting the education offered in UK universities.

that was then

It’s no surprise that 1997’s Dearing report included far-reaching recommendations on this.  It set in train the establishment of the UK Professional Standards Framework; recommended that all universities offer programmes accredited against this; and that ‘it should become the normal requirement that all new full-time academic staff with teaching responsibilities are required to achieve at least associate membership of the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, for the successful completion of probation’ [pp.126, 221].

This set the sector down a pathway, followed with varying degrees of timeliness and enthusiasm by all UK universities.  And the government’s view of the need for this journey was emphasised six years later in the White Paper The future of higher education, which boldly declared that ‘we will expect all new teaching staff to obtain a teaching qualification which meets the standards [i.e. UKPSF] from 2006’ [p.50].

This was entirely consistent with the approaches to public sector regulation of that Labour government.  And entirely predictably, from 2010 the new government and the resulting shift to data-, outcomes- and market-led approaches to regulation resulted in changes to what was expected of the sector on teaching qualifications.

Initially, reflecting the significant influence of Gibbs’ Dimensions of Quality, government continued to emphasise the role of teaching qualifications.  But the position was shifting.

The 2011 White Paper Students at the heart of the system ‘encourage[d] higher education institutions to publish anonymised information for prospective and existing students about the teaching qualifications, fellowships and expertise of their teaching staff at all levels’ [p.9].  Four years later, Success as a knowledge economy limited itself to noting HEFCE research that showed ‘better training for lecturers’ as being among student priorities alongside increased contact hours and smaller student groups [pp.43-44].

So over less than 20 years we had moved from instruction, to encouragement and finally to aimless comment.  Which is where it has stayed.

and this is now

When TEF was being established in 2016 there was chatter about whether the proportion of academic staff with teaching qualifications would become a TEF metric.  Some in the sector welcomed this prospect, others were horrified.  Ultimately it wasn’t one of the core metrics.  And then of course every university included the data in their TEF submission as part of their supplementary evidence …

With the exclusion of teaching qualifications data from TEF, and then its absence from the OfS regulatory landscape, the external drive on teaching qualifications effectively (almost) went away. But there was a lasting impact.

Most universities now require some kind of teaching qualification/recognition as a probationary requirement for new staff (though with patchy implementation in many universities).  Some have also embedded this within promotion processes, though again with different approaches (e.g. as potential evidence vs. as a requirement).

The other impact has been HESA’s collection and publication of data on the teaching qualifications of academic staff.  Many universities put significant efforts into improving the quality and comprehensiveness of this data in the early to mid 2010s, expecting/fearing that it may be used in regulation or TEF.  Now in the absence of that, the data is referred to infrequently (though I’m sure there was a spike in page impressions for this part of the HESA site last year, as everyone worked on TEF submissions).  We have transparency, but little visibility.

where are we now?

I’ve looked at a subset of this data, for the group of dual intensive universities identified by Vikki Bolivier as a distinct cluster (though not the Scottish universities in this group, as the HESA data excludes Scotland).  And while I’m not advocating that this data should be used as a regulatory tool, it remains interesting data.

I’ve taken the data and calculated the proportion of all academic staff with a teaching qualification for each of the 31 universities, and this box plot shows the resulting distribution of universities:

The data that underpins this is available in this spreadsheet (with a pivot that can be filtered by academic year, or institution).

(Source:  HESA Staff data Table 10 used under Creative Commons Open data licence CC-BY-4.0)

Overall this shows the sort of pattern that might be expected.  The proportion of staff with a teaching qualification was always likely to increase over time, as older staff without a teaching qualification left the workforce and newer staff joined who were (on the whole) expected to have a teaching qualification or gain one as a probation condition.

Initially rates of increase were higher, probably reflecting two things, both linked to the prospect/fear that the metric would be used in regulation/TEF: efforts within universities to record more systematically the teaching qualifications held by their staff; and pushes to have more established staff complete Higher Education Academy recognition and thereby be returnable as having a teaching qualification.

The fall-off in rates of increase in later years perhaps reflects the later absence of these two factors, but might also in part be due to the impact of the pandemic.  At this point some universities de-prioritised staff completing a teaching qualification, given the other huge pressures of that era.

welcome to wherever you are

Looking (through the pivot table linked to above) in more detail at what happened at institutional level is interesting.  There is a fairly common pattern for many of the universities in this sample:  initially low-ish numbers; a bit of a spurt; then incremental increases, and a settling down in the low 50s to low 60s.

There are also notable exceptions.

There is a group of universities who are consistent outliers at the lower end of the scale:  30% or below in 2021-22, and below 30% in every other year.  What’s interesting is that these are all London-based universities (and there is a fourth that exceeded 30%, but is now back below that level).

There are also a number of universities at the top end over 70%.  Some started with a high proportion of staff with teaching qualifications, and grew this: Manchester went from 67% to 70% over the period; Queen’s University Belfast from 64% to 78%.  Others made very significant strides:  Southampton from 41% to 70%; Leicester from 46% to 77%;  and Nottingham from 48% to 83%.

It is clear that some dual intensive universities have chosen to prioritise this issue, and have surged ahead.  Whether the universities that are in the peloton, or indeed the outliers at the back, are there through conscious choice, inaction or particular specific circumstance is an intriguing question.  What is clear is that the combination for teaching qualifications of data transparency, with regulatory invisibility, has led to very different outcomes in different universities.