Duc Pham, Mechanical Engineering, The University of Birmingham
The House of Lords made big international news recently by voting for two amendments to the so-called Brexit Bill, one to guarantee European citizens the right to remain in the UK and the other to give Parliament a vote on the final terms of withdrawal from the EU. Not so widely publicised were two other amendments passed by the Lords, relating to another piece of legislation, the Higher Education and Research Bill, which was going through its Report stage in the House. For the time being, the amendments effectively mean the rejection of the Olympic-style system proposed to rank UK universities and the link between such ranking and the amounts of student fees that universities can charge.
CMM readers not working in UK higher education may not be aware that the government is introducing a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The TEF is to incentivise excellent learning and teaching, in the same way as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) recognises and rewards excellent research. In 2017, its first trial year, the TEF will allow English universities to increase their tuition fees, in line with inflation, if they have been awarded a ‘Meets Expectations’ certification, meaning they have simply passed a baseline quality standard. For subsequent years, the government proposed to employ a rating system with three grades, gold, silver and bronze, based on a range of factors, including the National Student Survey (NSS) results, dropout rates, and graduate employment rates.
According to the Department for Education (DfE) which is responsible for administering the TEF, a university will be conferred a gold grade if its courses offer “outstanding levels of stretch that ensures all students are significantly challenged to achieve their full potential.” Students will need to be “frequently engaged with developments from the forefront of research, scholarship or practice.” Universities with courses delivering “high levels of stretch that ensures all students are significantly challenged,” will receive silver grades, while bronze awards will go to universities where “provision is of satisfactory quality … however, the provider is likely to be significantly below benchmark in one or more areas.”
The DfE also proposed that, from 2018, the ratings would determine which universities would be permitted to raise their tuition fees by the rate of inflation. Universities that achieved a TEF rating in 2017 of gold, silver or bronze would be permitted to raise their fees in line with the inflation forecast in 2018/19. However, from 2019/20, universities with a bronze rating would only be permitted to raise their maximum tuition fee by 50% of the predicted rate of inflation, while those with silver or gold ratings would be able to track inflation fully. Clearly, over time, that would lead to a widening gap between the fees payable at different institutions.
While there was little doubt about the value of continuing to raise the standard of teaching and properly recognising and rewarding excellence in teaching, the arguments for the amendments were compelling: the proposed single composite ranking system was crude and would damage the higher education sector; due to its blanket nature, the proposed assessment was not useful to students, the main intended beneficiaries; the metrics, particularly NSS scores, used to arrive at the different ratings were unsuitable and unreliable; the TEF was untried and its validity uncertain; and students had overwhelmingly been opposed to the idea of linking it to fee levels (http://wonkhe.com/blogs/government-defeated-in-the-lords-over-tef-and-fees/).
As a stakeholder, I have been following debates in the House of Lords on this Higher Education and Research Bill with bated breath. Whether those sensible amendments by the House will survive the return passage through the Commons and finally become part of actual legislation remains to be seen. The Lords may not prevail in the end – some have predicted that MPs will vote to remove the amendments due to the risk posed to the TEF. Nevertheless, observation of law-making has left me impressed with the knowledge and wisdom of members of the second chamber of Parliament and their meticulous examination of draft legislation to highlight problems and help create workable law.
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/engineering/mechanical-engineering/index.aspx