Today’s Education in the Media blog looks at plans to rate university courses.
Teaching Excellence Framework
Today, Monday 12 March, Universities Minister Sam Gyimah announced that teaching excellence will be rewarded and poor quality teaching exposed under a new rating system for subjects at English universities. The measure – a world first – will provide students with clear information on the quality of the courses they are thinking of applying for. The announcement of the subject-level Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) has been widely covered including in The Telegraph, FT, Guardian, Daily Mail, Times, and BBC online Minister Gyimah was also interviewed on The Today Programme and Sky News.
The subject-level TEF will rate courses as either gold, silver or bronze. The move will ensure that universities are scrutinised on the quality of their teaching, learning environment and graduate outcomes, to help students make informed choices on which courses provide value for money.
Plans announced today build on the first wave of TEF, which awards universities with an overall rating of gold, silver or bronze.
The Minister will also launch an Open Data competition, the first of its kind in the UK Higher Education sector, which will use selected government data on universities so that tech companies and coders can create apps to help prospective students decide where to apply.
Universities Minister Sam Gyimah said:
Prospective students deserve to know which courses deliver great teaching and great outcomes – and which ones are lagging behind.
In the age of the student, universities will no longer be able to hide if their teaching quality is not up to the world-class standard that we expect.
The new subject-level TEF will give students more information than ever before, allowing them to drill down and compare universities by subject. This will level the international playing field to help applicants make better choices, and ensure that more students get the value for money they deserve from higher education.
To read about today’s announcement, see here.