Universities Scotland has responded to a call for evidence from the UK Department for Education (DfE) to inform a review of the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF). The review will report in summer 2019 and the recommendations will be considered before the implementation subject-level TEF.

Currently, five Scottish institutions participate in institutional-level TEF, and a further two have participated in the Year 3 subject-level pilots.

Our response highlights Scotland-specific issues, such as the flexibility of the Scottish degree making it difficult to track a ‘typical’ trajectory for a student graduating with a specific degree. We also outlined our reservations about several aspects of the metrics and benchmarking used in the provider-level framework, particularly the use of POLAR, the non-continuation metric, and the use of LEO data.

Read our submission here.