How can we make universities better at teaching?

Goldsmiths, University of London

How can you foster changes in a sector where being part of an unchanged, old institution is taken as a badge of honour? That is the fundamental problem that faces the new universities minister. In no other area of public life is it so profitable a strategy to market your product as essentially unchanged for centuries.

Jo Johnson, the Universities Minister, has clearly identified that teaching quality is his biggest worry: even at leading universities, students can often feel they have a bad deal. I've written before about how arts students, in particular, sometimes feel they are cross-subsidising the education of their less cultured science-studying contemporaries after the 2012 fee rise (disclaimer: I studied modern history).

He said his aim is to "build a culture where teaching has equal status with research, with great teachers enjoying the same professional recognition and opportunities for career and pay progression as great researchers". That is a serious concern: there really ought to be more professorships and cash for people who devote themselves to high-level teaching. The academy undervalues that skill and worries too much about research.

The Teaching Excellence Framework

To drive that change, Johnson confirmed in a speech to UUK, the university sector umbrella body, that he wants a "a teaching excellence framework that creates incentives for universities to devote as much attention to the quality of teaching as fee-paying students and prospective employers have a right to expect". This was a Conservative manifesto commitment.

Universities Minister Jo Johnson

That sounds vague, but ears prick up at the words "Teaching Excellence Framework". That is because there is already something called a "Research Excellence Framework": a gigantic beauty parade in which universities show off how good their research work actually is. It is a vast enterprise: the last round took place last year involving submissions from 52,061 academics. The previous round was in 2008.

There is a lot of debate about some of the measures used by the REF to gauge how good work is and what impact research has, but universities play ball. That is because the REF determines how much of around a £1bn a year of "quality-related" research funding universities get. This money is prized, because it comes with no strings attached, and can be used for blue-sky research.

The TEF idea is at its early stages: vice-chancellors are quite pleased that Mr Johnson is taking quite a consultative approach to the sector. But the term "TEF" may be ill-chosen: the minister had to clarify: "I have no intention of replicating the individual and institutional burdens of the REF. I am clear that any external review must be proportionate and light touch, not big, bossy and bureaucratic."

More market

The final product, unlike the REF, may not use the promise of teaching grants money as a lure. It may work through reputation. I suspect institutions are heading for a super-charged version of the KIS - the Key Information Sets - data that universities have to publish for students to judge them by.

You can imagine a situation where students know how much previous students earn three years out, five years out and 10 years out, Feedback on how much they enjoyed the course and what the workload really entails. Maybe we will get that with a gentle Ofsted system for universities on top, where weak provision will be highlighted by external assessors.

Perhaps the system could have input from employers and other academics who have recruited widely, too, on whether they think the course prepares people well for work or further study. This need not be positive: I am aware of two economics courses whose curricula mean some leading universities will not ever take their undergraduates (more on that another day).

Mr Johnson said his plans are a continuation of the previous pro-market reforms - not a change in direction. If these reforms mean more information for students to behave as consumers and rely on, in effect, replacing historic reputations with real information about what they offer, I think that would be a fair summary.

This might lead you to scepticism: after all, we have heard this before. But even if the TEF has no money attached, there's another, subtle way that they could have an effect.

Remember that Mr Johnson's audience today was vice-chancellors, the leaders of the universities. The REF is useful to them because it gives them a structure for managing their research staff. If the TEF is structured well, it could do the same for teaching. Given their concern about institutional prestige and student recruitment, it could give institutions a structure by which they can take teaching more seriously.

We will have to wait and see. A lot is going to depend on how the detail is framed. Raising teaching quality and telling prospective students what they need to know are surprisingly tough issues. They require ministers to find a way to make sure state-subsidised courses are high quality while preserving universities' academic liberty.