Unit 1 – TPP Blog Post 3
Education policy: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Education policy can have a big impact on student learning, but it’s not always for the better. Sometimes, education policy makers come up with ideas that are so crazy, they make you wonder if they’ve ever been in a lecture hall.
There are a few examples of education policies that have gone wrong in UK universities but this blogpost will focus on one, The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).
- The TEF is a government initiative that aims to reward universities for teaching excellence. However, the TEF has been criticised for being too focused on quantitative measures of teaching quality, such as student satisfaction surveys. This has led to universities teaching to the test and neglecting other important aspects of teaching, such as critical thinking and creativity.
TEF doesn’t really measure university ‘teaching’, so it can be misleading. The input metrics are actually based on student satisfaction measures, retention and employment, all of which could be classified as ‘student experience’ rather than teaching.
TEF was in essence was designed to differentiate and increase the fees universities could charge students, in reality the TEF doesn’t really measure teaching. But as the name wrongly suggests, students and parents may make the assumption that the TEF is a good measure of teaching quality, when in fact it is not. This could lead students to choose universities based on their TEF rating, even if the teaching at those universities is not actually any good.
UAL’s Arts Student Union submitted their Arts SU’s TEF at the start of 2023 and results are to be published some time in September 2023. The rating of Gold, Silver, Bronze then remain for four years. UAL is currently rated as Silver.
The main issue with a blanket rating is that UAL as an educational establishment, to put it mildly, is HUGE. Not only that, there are several colleges each with its own unique focus and specialisation. For example, the London College of Fashion (LCF) offers a wide range of courses in fashion, design, and business, while the Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design offers courses in fine art, graphic design, and performance.
Within each college, there is also a wide variation in the types of courses offered. FBS (Fashion Business School), where I work, offers science-based subjects such as Cosmetic Science, as well as business-based subjects such as Marketing.
This diversity in courses means that teaching and learning will vary significantly from course to course. For example, a Cosmetic Science course will require students to learn in a laboratory setting, while on our Marketing course we require students to work on case studies and metrics.
The beauty of an Arts School is supposed to be that it does not conform to the norm or expectations of more academically inclined institutes. UAL should and in fact does encourage a variety of new teaching practices and developments as such in the field of teaching.
Reinforcing the point that a blanket rating system cannot adequately account for this diversity. It is unfair to compare the teaching quality of a Cosmetic Science course to the teaching quality of a Marketing course, as they are two very different types of courses with different approaches to teaching.
In addition, student experience will vary from course to course.
The TEF rating system then cannot be expected to adequately capture the nuances of student experience. It is unfair to compare the student experience of a Fine Art course to the student experience of a Fashion Design course, as they are two very different types of courses with different expectations.
The variety of courses and students at UAL means that a more nuanced approach is needed.
Teaching varies from course to course, as does student experience.