We have responded to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) consultation on the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF): year 2 – technical consultation, which seeks views on the operation of the TEF in year 2, including the assessment framework and process.

Read our full consultation response.

Summary of our response:

Scotland’s universities welcome the undertaking to explore ways of accommodating the Scottish higher education sector’s distinctive approach to quality in learning and teaching. However, institutions are united in wishing to retain their enhancement-led ethos, together with the best tried and tested procedures for ensuring high quality not only in individual institutions, but in a shared and collaborative manner across the sector as a whole. So far, it has been difficult for the sector to understand BIS’s thinking on the ways in which TEF metrics and submissions will take account of Scottish specificities, and even less how TEF might acknowledge the principles of enhancement.

Our wish is exactly as outlined in the White Paper: to explore with BIS whether TEF can be designed in a way that is compatible with participation by the Scottish sector, with a fair basis for the assessment of metrics and without abandoning our enhancement-led ethos. In short, we wish to investigate an articulation scheme that acknowledges the different but equivalent status of the Quality Enhancement Framework (QEF) and Ehancement-led Institutional Review (ELIR).

Please note – this consultation response is not our full statement on our position on TEF, but is our position on a specific aspect of the TEF proposals.