pursued by excellence: rewards and the performance culture in higher education
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Pursued by Excellence: Rewards andthe Performance Culture in HigherEducationImogen TaylorPublished online: 02 Jul 2007.
To cite this article: Imogen Taylor (2007) Pursued by Excellence: Rewards and the PerformanceCulture in Higher Education, Social Work Education: The International Journal, 26:5, 504-519, DOI:10.1080/02615470601118647
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Pursued by Excellence: Rewards andthe Performance Culture in HigherEducationImogen Taylor
In the UK, government is both concerned with improving the performance of public
services, including higher education, and with ensuring that the public is aware of
improvements in services, to convince the public of the effectiveness of the current regime.
Success is both an effect of and a dynamic in the process of evaluating performance, and
increasingly ‘excellence’ is established as a performance outcome. Drawing on a critical
review of relevant theory and research, primarily from the UK, Australia and the USA,
and illustrated by the author’s experience of winning a National Teaching Fellowship,
this paper examines teaching excellence in the context of two recent schemes: the
National Teaching Fellowship Scheme and the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and
Learning. The performance culture in the public sector and the use of excellence as a
success criterion are critically analysed. Assumptions about the transfer of excellent
practice are explored. Questions about the interaction of competition and equalities
issues are raised. The paper ends with arguing that if excellence schemes are to be an
established feature of public sector systems, then we must develop strategies to enable
them to be implemented equitably, transparently and fit for purpose.
Keywords: Higher Education; Social Work Education; Teaching Excellence; National
Teaching Fellowship; Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
Introduction
Winning creates a positive aura, a halo effect that encourages productive behaviourand attracts investment (of money, talent, votes, press notice, public attention) tofacilitate further wins. Success makes people feel more engaged with their task andwith each other. It makes them want to spend more time with each other and helpeach other succeed. Respect grows, and so does security, so people are more willing
Correspondence to: Professor Imogen Taylor, School of Social Work and Social Care, University of Sussex, Brighton
BN1 7RQ, UK. Email: [email protected]
Social Work EducationVol. 26, No. 5, August 2007, pp. 504–519
ISSN 0261-5479 print/1470-1227 online # 2007 The Board of Social Work EducationDOI: 10.1080/02615470601118647
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to take responsibility and admit mistakes. (Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, 14thAnnual Lecture to the Economic and Social Research Council, November 2003)
Kanter, a leading American management theorist, gave the 2003 Annual Economic
and Social Research Council (ESRC) Lecture in London, remarkable in this august
context because it celebrates the value of winning, in a discourse more typical of
business than the academy. Externally validated ‘success’, where ‘excellence’ is likely
to be the highest achievable award, has become an all-important organisational goal.
‘Excellence’ is becoming ubiquitous in university mission statements and not
pursuing excellence is tantamount to admission of failure (Light, 2000). The risk is
that, ‘What is being taught or researched has become less important than it should be
done excellently’ (Meadmore, 1998 in Morley, 2001b, p. 472).
Competition and judgements of excellence increasingly justify the differentiated
allocation of prestige, significant financial resources and special freedoms in higher
education (Morley, 2002). Competition in research is familiar in academia
where reputation is a highly prized commodity (Becher, 1989) and peers judge
publications, conference papers, research applications and reports, yet this is
essentially a private business and the process generates surprisingly little public
debate. However, since 2000, two government-led competitions have been
introduced to raise the status of learning and teaching and counterbalance the
value attributed to research: the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS)
(HEFCE, 1998) in England and Northern Ireland, and the Centres for Excellence in
Teaching and Learning (CETL) (Department for Education and Skills, 2003) in
England and Wales. Their large rewards based on judgements of excellence are
intended to raise the stakes. Social work education has entered this arena, and
between 2001 and 2005 five National Teaching Fellows were from social work or
social policy (overall total 130), and 17 CETL (overall total 74) are associated with
these fields (www.swap.ac.uk/about/projects05.asp). Yet, teaching ‘excellence’ is
insufficiently conceptualised, minimally researched in higher education, and not
researched at all in social work education. This paper aims to address the gap and
begin to problematise the issue and debate the concepts, focusing primarily on social
work education but inevitably referring to policy and literature about the wider
higher education context.
I begin by discussing the methods used to research this paper. I then examine the
performance culture in the public sector where the issues are beginning to be
conceptualised. Informed by this discussion, I critically analyse how the NTFS and
the CETLs define ‘excellence’, and who defines it. I then examine the assumption
that excellent teaching can be transferred to teaching that requires improvement.
I go on to explore possible implications for the equalities agenda in higher
education and in particular the potential values conflicts in social work education.
Finally, I propose strategies for using the excellence agenda creatively and suggest
that unless we are effective in doing this, the excellence agenda is vulnerable to
accusations of rhetoric where presentation gains ‘hegemonic power over content’
(Morley, 2001a, p. 129).
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Methodology
This analysis is derived from a critical review of English language theory and research
about ‘excellence’ in higher education, with a particular focus on social work
education. ASSIA, ERIC, and the British and Australian Education Indexes were
systematically searched from 1985 to 2005. The earlier date was selected as it pre-
dates what appears to be the first discussion about excellence in learning and teaching
in higher education (Munson, 1994). Search terms used were, ‘higher education’,
‘social work education’, ‘teaching excellence’, ‘transfer and excellence’, and ‘gender
and excellence’. Conceptual and empirical studies were included. The electronic
search generated a few predominantly British, Australian and American studies with
two from Canada, one from New Zealand and none from continental Europe. Hand-
searching and following up references generated by electronic searching allowed for
the scope of material identified to be expanded. Additional literatures were drawn on
to enable the development of a conceptual analysis, including British and North
American social work and social policy literatures about audit and inspection,
management literature about ‘excellence’ in business, and education literature about
‘transfer of learning’. Reflections from my experience of winning a National Teaching
Fellowship in 2003, the award that was the genesis of this paper, are used to provide
an ‘insider’ perspective and illustrate my points.
There is little robust empirical research about teaching excellence schemes and the
majority of studies are of single case institutional level schemes. There appear to be
two possible reasons for this. First, the concept of ‘policy churn’ (Peck, 2001, p. 15)
refers to the problematic relationship between innovation and evaluation, where the
process of ‘continuous improvement’ makes evaluation a moving target (Clarke,
2004, p. 135). Secondly, the paucity of research may reflect the deeply ideological
nature of the competitive culture (Rustin, 2003). However, there are two national
empirical studies, one British and the other Australian, that provide robust evidence
and raise important conceptual questions.
Skelton (2004) researched the first year of the NTFS, ‘to understand what
assumptions about teaching excellence were feeding into the development of the
scheme and its procedures and criteria’ (p. 455). The study, funded by the ESRC, was
organised into three phases. (1) A literature review on teaching excellence and an
analysis of reward schemes found in other countries; a documentary analysis of the
NTFS; and, four focus groups with teachers and students at two universities to elicit
perceptions of ‘teaching excellence’. (2) Interviews with the first 20 Teaching Fellows;
with six members of the National Advisory Panel responsible for devising the criteria
for making the choices; and with non-participating universities as well as with
representatives of the Higher Education Funding Council, England and the Institute
for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. (3) Content analysis of data
generated from the interviews.
Almost a decade earlier, Ramsden & Martin (1996) undertook a survey in 1994 of
Australian universities’ policies and practices for rewarding good teaching. About half
of the 32 respondent universities (out of a possible 36) reported that they had
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developed criteria for identifying levels of teaching competence or teaching
excellence. Six universities were chosen for detailed study and there was a 58%
response rate to 2,579 questionnaires distributed to a sample of staff about their
perceptions of the extent to which they felt their universities valued and rewarded
good teaching.
The Performance Culture and Performativity
Winning a National Teaching Fellowship was exciting. The Award ceremony is aprestigious event and is probably as close as UK academics come to the HigherEducation Oscars. I briefly felt like a minor celebrity. Before the ceremony, theFellows had a private meeting with the then Minister for Higher Education, his firstpublic appearance soon after his appointment. I had rehearsed a point aboutuniversity funding and rapidly made it in the few precious seconds available as theMinister circulated the managed assembly line of small groups of NationalTeaching Fellows. Photos were taken with the Minister as he presented the awards.My Vice Chancellor attended. The Times Higher Education Supplement providedcopious press coverage, and an interview in The Guardian (Cunningham, 2003)resulted in complete strangers writing to me. My Fellowship was timely. Incommon with other universities competing in the market place, my research-leduniversity was radically overhauling its public image and promotional materials. Ibecame public property and joined the performance of the university.
The glittering awards ceremony was unexpected and disconcerting, possibly because
for me, in common with I imagine the vast majority of academics, red carpet
treatment is far from our experience. I was an actor but I was not sure that I
understood the sub-text of the play, or the culture within which it was being
performed. Barnett, a British higher education theorist, said, ‘The idea of excellence
has no content, it is neither true nor false, ignorant nor self conscious’, and as ‘a
carrier of a state driven ideology’ it should be put aside (2000, p. 2). Was this
desirable, or even possible?
An analysis of the performance culture in higher education and its relationship to
the wider public services performance culture is largely missing from empirical
studies of teaching excellence. Skelton (2004) refers to the wider social, economic and
political context as it shapes perceptions of excellence in teaching (for example, the
influence of learning technologies), but he does not theorise the relationship between
the socio-political context and excellence schemes themselves. I turn now to the
social policy and management literatures that are beginning to problematise the issue.
John Clarke, an Open University social policy theorist, reminds us that the roots of
the performance culture lie in the 1970s and 1980s and the Conservative government
focus on the efficient and effective use of resources. However, it is the New Labour
concern, beginning in the late 1990s, that the public should also be aware of
improvements in services that is relevant here. Clarke identifies the ‘performance
evaluation nexus’ (2004, p. 131), the proliferation of scrutiny agencies which evaluate
performance, create comparisons and function as policy enforcers and management
consultants. Their purpose is to address consumer anxiety about the quality of public
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services, exercise arms length control, focus on ‘what works’, and, testify to
government effectiveness. ‘Performance thus becomes a vehicle for putting on a
governmental (italics in original) show—setting standards, showing evidence of
quality and improvement, celebrating success and ‘‘naming and shaming’’ the
backsliders’ (Clarke, 2004, p. 137). The audiences for governmental performance are
simultaneously evaluating both the performance evidence and the display of
governmental capacity and authority. Performance management is not only about
achieving targets and goals but also about presenting the organisation’s performance
in ways that testify to its achievements and effectiveness. Failure may be the result of
either or both forms of management.
‘Success’ is central to the performance evaluation nexus and is both an effect of,
and a dynamic in, the process of evaluation (Clarke, 2004, p. 140). Evaluation creates
different kinds of success: it ranks winners and losers; it predisposes people to
attempt to be successful; and, it produces actors with an interest in success whether
they are individuals, managers or organisations. Success can demonstrate that
scrutiny works and a policy has its desired effect, creating a ‘success spiral’ (Clarke,
2004, p. 142) in which all participants have an interest, echoed by Moss Kanter (2003)
in the quote which introduces this paper.
Social work has not escaped the excellence agenda and the emphasis on quality
assessment of performance in practice is firmly embedded (see for example
Humphrey’s study of Joint Reviews of Social Services in England and Wales,
2002a, 2002b, 2003). Awards for excellent practice have become common place. For
example, in the wider field of social care, the National Training Strategy Accolades
‘celebrate outstanding achievement in workforce development for the social care
sector’ (www.skillsforcare.org.uk).
Discussion of the importance of the visibility of success is also found in the
management literature. Attention to ‘excellence’ soared in the USA in 1982, with In
Search of Excellence (Peters & Waterman, 1982) focusing on management and
business. In the UK, Gabriel (2003) suggests that organisations have moved from a
pre-occupation with efficiency and effectiveness and the consumer as the measure of
all things to an emphasis on display. He contrasts Weber’s image of the iron cage of
rigid, rational and bureaucratic organisations with the glass cage and the glass palace
of today that emphasises
display, an invisibility of constraints, a powerful illusion of choice, a glamorisationof image … Above all there is an ambiguity as to whether the glass is a medium ofentrapment or a beautifying frame and a constant reminder of the fragility andbrittleness of all that surrounds us. (Gabriel, 2003, p. 182)
The notion of display is vividly illustrated by Humphrey (2003) who quotes a
Social Services Manager,
It is a fact of life now. It’s like Ofsted. It’s like Best Value. There’s going to be morepeople inspecting us than there are people running this place. It’ll be ‘‘Which one isit this week—inspection, audit or review?’’ There’s going to be streams of peoplecoming into look at us and our day job is to be responding to those things aswell as overseeing the delivery of services … This is our job! And we’ve got to
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train ourselves to work with auditors and inspectors on top of service delivery.But increasingly working with auditors and inspectors will be our main job,our real job. This is our real world now! (Humphrey, 2003, pp. 735–736; italics inoriginal)
Display has taken precedence, and risks becoming more important than the
performance standards being evaluated.
If success is achieved, it is impossible to rest on one’s laurels. In the glass palace,
successes are never a stable equilibrium but ‘a process of irregularity, innovation and
disorder, where temporary triumphs occur at the edge of the abyss and can never be
regularised into blissful routine’ (Gabriel, 2003, p. 171). Bunting (2004), in Willing
Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruining our Lives, explores the performance
pressure where not only do we have to do our jobs, but we have to make sure that
everyone knows how well we have done them, to secure our positions and
performance related pay and promotion. For those who wish to avoid the roller
coaster of victory and defeat, constant adaptation and reinvention of the self is
required. This dynamic is touched on by Morley (2001a) who, in a study of quality
assurance, interviewed 36 academics and administrators (18 men and 18 women)
from 36 higher education institutions in England, Scotland and Wales. She found
that, ‘It is not enough simply to reproduce skills and knowledges for which one was
originally appointed. There is an imperative to be entrepreneurial, innovative and to
add value to one’s organisation’ (p. 68).
The pressures of the success spiral are ubiquitous for the individual academic, but
even more so for the academic manager and leader. In my experience in social work
education, often in a tenuous position in a research intensive university, survival of a
whole department may be at stake. Pressures to demonstrate success require constant
attention if one is to remain on the roller coaster. Choosing to get off may have
damaging resource and reputation consequences (Clarke, 2004).
Opting for Excellence Schemes in Higher Education
When first approached by my university about being nominated to the NTFS, Ideclined. I was a very busy new Head of Department doing relatively little teaching.My disinclination was increased by a newspaper article (Leon, 2002) that suggestedwinning a teaching award in a research intensive university was a ‘‘poison chalice’’.However, when approached again the following year, it felt churlish not to try foran award that my university was very keen to win. Furthermore, the prize moneycould offer some interesting possibilities.
My apprehension about the ‘poison chalice’ is ironic given that teaching excellence
schemes were introduced precisely to raise the status of teaching in institutions such
as my own. Competing for the award felt individually and collectively risky in my
university where only a year earlier I had been appointed as Chair and Head of
Department with the specific brief to increase the research productivity of the social
work group. However, the enthusiasm of the university to achieve its first NTFS was
ultimately the decisive factor in my decision to compete.
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The 1990s saw the introduction of institutional level higher education excellence
schemes in the UK (Thomas, 1993; Warren & Plumb, 1999); Australia (McNaught &
Anwyl, 1993; Dunkin, 1995); the USA supported by the Carnegie Foundation (see for
example, Hutchings & Shulman, 1999); and, Canada (Nadeau, 1992). In the UK, the
proportion of universities including recognition and reward mechanisms in their
learning and teaching strategies increased from 12% in 1998 to 65% in 2000 (Gibbs &
Habeshaw, 2002). Rewards include: promotions based on teaching excellence;
teaching awards and prizes; additional pay and/or increments; publicity and events
that showcase excellence; and, new titles that ascribe status. Such mechanisms are
encouraged by the Funding Councils: ‘We wish to increase the status of learning and
teaching, (and) reward high quality’ (HEFCE, 1999 in Gibbs & Habeshaw, 2002, p. 1).
The NTFS was the first national level award scheme for higher education teachers
in England and Northern Ireland. It was derived from similar schemes in Australia,
the USA and Canada, and launched in 2000 by the then Institute for Learning and
Teaching for Higher Education, now integrated into the Higher Education Academy.
It rewards demonstrable excellence in teaching with a title and national recognition,
and in the early years £50,000 was awarded to Fellowship holders to support a
teaching development project, and 20 Fellowships were awarded nationally. In 2004,
following the White Paper, The Future of Higher Education (2003), and a reduction in
money awarded, the scheme was expanded to include nominations in three
categories: experienced staff, learning support staff, and ‘rising stars’. By 2005 there
were 130 NTFS winners; 52% located in post-1992 and 38% in pre-1992 universities
(10% in specialist colleges) (HEFCE, 2005).
The same White Paper (2003) heralded the Centres of Excellence in Teaching and
Learning (CETL) in England and Wales, ‘To reward excellent teaching and to invest
in that practice further in order to increase and deepen its impact across a wider
teaching and learning community’ (HEFCE, 2004, p. 1). The reward is up to £500,000
per year for five years plus up to £2 million for capital refurbishment. After a two
stage bidding process, 74 CETL were launched in April 2005, ‘The establishment of
these CETL ensures that substantial investment goes directly into good teaching and
learning so that current and future students, supported by excellent, motivated
teachers, can look forward to an inspiring, challenging and worthwhile learning
experience’ (HEFCE, 2005, p. 9).
Identifying and Implementing Excellence Criteria
Putting the portfolio of evidence together was challenging, as the criteria were sobroad that it was unclear what evidence might be most relevant. I was aware that,compared with the quality of research evidence systematically documented for theRAE, ‘‘evidence about teaching can look flimsy and unconvincing’’ (Gibbs &Habeshaw, 2002, p. 7). I selected a reflective approach to presenting mysubmission, consistent with my approach to teaching and research (Taylor,1997). However, reading Skelton’s (2004) study following my own success wasdisconcerting as he criticises the NTFS model for being informed strongly by a
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model of ‘‘reflective practice’’. Did I ‘‘win’’ because I had inadvertently played agame?
‘Counterfeit reflection’ in situations where reflexivity is prescribed and circumscribed
by external agents and candidates learn to read the signals and play the game will
always be a risk (Clegg, 1999, p. 177 in Morley, 2001a, p. 76). Similar to assessment of
student work, such risks may be circumvented by rigour and transparency in the
selection of criteria and their application. Interestingly, pre-dating institutional level
excellence schemes, attention to the criteria for ‘excellence’ in social work education
first emerged in 1986 in the USA when the National Conference of Deans and
Directors of Graduate Schools of Social Work commissioned Carleton Munson to
consider criteria for excellence. From 1986 to 1991, Munson developed criteria to
assess excellence in 21 focus group sessions, with from three to 38 participants across
three undergraduate and four graduate social work programmes. Groups were asked
to discuss programme excellence from the perspective of whether it existed and what
could be done to promote it. Seven excellence characteristics were identified:
attractiveness, benefit, congruency, uniqueness, ability to produce growth, function-
ality and spirit. Skelton would categorise these as the ‘individual enthusiast’ approach
(2004, p. 452) to teaching, where excellence is viewed as a quality. Munson argued
that such ‘broad characteristics may prevent narrow, rigid measures that stifle rather
than promote development and creativity’ (1994, p. 51), possibly alluding to the
debates about the competence approach characteristic of social work education in the
1980s and 1990s. Munson’s study was published in 1994, and a search of the Social
Science Citation Index reveals that it has only been peripherally referred to on one
occasion since then (Pennell & Ristock, 1999).
Skelton (2004) documents the considerable difficulty experienced by the National
Advisory Panel in devising and implementing the criteria for assessing teaching
excellence. The Panel generated the criteria deductively rather than working
inductively from a consideration of real cases. They were offered provisional criteria
consistent with those that people needed to join the Institute for Learning and
Teaching in Higher Education. However, they chose to develop their own four
‘broad’ criteria to judge applications (see Table 1). They also list ‘illustrative
characteristics’ of excellent teachers including innovation in the design and delivery
of learning activities, the ability to arouse curiosity and stimulate independent
learning, and recognition of the value of student diversity.
Ramsden & Martin (1996) had found that sources of evidence used to assess
teaching were relatively limited and that only half of the universities surveyed had
developed criteria to assess teaching. They particularly criticised the omission of
criteria relating to research and scholarship, ‘Given the importance of research and
scholarship as distinctive elements of good teaching at university level, it is
remarkable that only a small proportion of universities reported having developed
criteria for identifying the contribution of these activities to teaching performance’
(p. 302). A commitment to the scholarship of learning and teaching and participation
in related research are included by the NTFS, but only as ‘illustrative characteristics’.
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The CETL ‘excellence’ criteria are equally broad and equivocal. However, they
appear to introduce two new factors, the possibility of sector-specific criteria and the
importance of evidence:
We do not attempt to define excellence in absolute or ‘‘gold standard’’ terms … Itis more instructive to ask how excellence is recognised across the sector, whatmakes it distinctive, where and how it shows itself and whose judgements arepertinent in relation to successful learning. (HEFCE, 2004, p. 13)
Table 1 shows that the discourse of the criteria for the NTFS and the CETL criteria is
remarkably similar.
It will be noted that the CETL do not include a criterion about reflective practice.
Skelton (2004) criticised the NTFS reliance on a reflective model to the exclusion of
other models. Furthermore, he claimed that reflection emphasises the individual
transaction between teacher and learner and negates the wider socio-political context.
In social work education though, we would expect reflection to address structural
issues of power and oppression. Indeed, social work academics, along with those
from allied fields such as teaching and nursing, might argue strongly that a reflective
practice model should predominate in an assessment of teaching excellence. There
might, however, be a risk that familiarity with a reflective discourse could provide an
advantage over candidates from other disciplines. Debates such as these raise the
question about whether one set of common criteria is feasible.
The issue of who assesses excellence is also crucial to the outcome. Staff in the
Ramsden & Martin (1996) survey indicated that peer review should be used similar to
that in research. Gibbs & Habeshaw (2002) also suggested that assessment of teaching
could learn from the long history of assessment of research where in their view there
is broad agreement about the nature of research excellence. However, in UK social
work research, such agreement was not demonstrated in discussion following the
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2001, where for example the definition of
Table 1 Criteria for the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme and Centres for Excellence
in Teaching and Learning
National Teaching Fellowship Scheme Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning
The nominee’s ability to influencestudents positively, to inspire studentsand to enable students to achieve specificlearning outcomes.
Engagement with students.
The ability to influence and inspirecolleagues in their learning, teaching andassessment practice.
The potential for extending the impact ofexcellence into other programmes or areasof student learning, or to other learners.
The track record or potential to influencepositively the wider national communityof teachers and learners in relation toteaching, learning and assessment practice.
Evidence of successful endorsement orvalidation by students, teachers, employersand institutions.
The ability to demonstrate a reflectiveapproach to teaching and/or supportof learning.
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‘international’ research was hotly debated in the Journal of Social Work by Gambrill
(2003), an international assessor for the RAE, and MacGregor (2003), Chair of the
2001 Social Policy and Social Work Panel.
Which peers undertake assessment also needs consideration. The NTFS expert panel
approach is criticised for its high concentration of managers and education developers
and few members with substantial experience of educational research, limited student
representation and the preponderance of ‘white and grey’ (Skelton, 2004, p. 456). Skelton
found that ‘The amount and quality of deliberation within the National Advisory Panel
was limited … an emphasis on speed and efficiency seemed to dominate the meetings’
(p. 456) with little debate about alternative interpretations of ‘excellence’. Members
expressed different views about whether there had been inter-judge reliability.
Whereas data are not yet available about CETL processes, the initiative was clear
that ‘Key judgements lie with students, teachers, employers and institutions’ (HEFCE,
2004, p. 13). The role of educational developers and managers significant to the NTFS
Panel is invisible in the CETL and educational researchers are not mentioned. The
role of the service user and carer is not referred to in either competition, and this,
together with the role of Practice Teachers again highlights the need for discipline-
specific assessment.
Ramsden (1998, in Morley, 2001a, p. 137) argues that feedback from the customer,
the consumer, and the lifelong learner is the one measure of performance that should
count. Ramsden & Martin (1996) found that student feedback was used as a source of
evidence to assess teaching in more than half the universities surveyed. Morley
(2001a), however, warns against over valuing the student view as it risks
homogenising student voices, overlooks power relations in the student body and
can be methodologically unreliable. Hillier & Vielba (2001), in a small UK study that
used focus groups and questionnaires for staff and students in one institution to
define and measure excellence in teaching, found that students focused their
definitions of excellence on a teacher’s personal qualities, particularly enthusiasm,
creativity and interpersonal skills. In addition, students identified the importance of
oral communication skills. These characteristics echo the Munson (1994) criteria
discussed earlier, also based on focus groups with staff and students.
Debates about the role of student feedback were heightened in 2005 with the
introduction in England, Wales and Northern Ireland of the first National Student
Survey when final year students (62% response rate) were asked a series of questions
about their experience and the results posted on the Teaching Quality Information
Website (www.thestudentsurvey.com). Outcomes were also widely reported in the
media with the construction of yet more league tables of performance.
In Canada in 2004, TV Ontario introduced a new dimension by including a TV
audience in its province wide search for the ‘best lecturers’. Students and ‘faculty
members’ nominated lecturers who were reduced to a short list of 30. The latter
provided a taped lecture and were shortlisted to 10 by a three-judge panel of media
figures including the editor of a literary review, a journalist and an actor. The 10
finalists were ‘profiled’ on TV and viewers invited to vote. The producer endorsed the
importance of performance, ‘We were looking for professors who have a knack of
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performance … So when you take a person who possesses a great deal of thought and
brings emotion and energy then this makes for fascinating television’ (http://
www.news.utoronto.ca/bin6/050817-1565.asp, accessed 19 August 2005).
Transfer of Excellent Practice?
Having been shortlisted, for the second stage I had to develop a project on which Iwould spend the £50,000 prize money. Information about what was required forthe project was brief and ambiguous. Who was meant to benefit? Was I meant toexperiment and innovate? To support immediate colleagues or the widercommunity to develop excellence? What made me an expert? Designing a projectplan that took account of my management responsibilities and my need to be RAEactive was essential. It was important to manage these various tensions yet alsodevelop a project that was liberating and creative.
Teachers rewarded for excellence are assumed to have legitimate authority as experts
(Gosling, 1996 in Skelton, 2004), yet this cannot inevitably be the case in
competitions where processes are contested. Furthermore, the notion that excellent
practice can be transferred and improve the practice of others is explicit in both the
CETLs and the NTFS (see Table 1). This was troubling as I was familiar with the work
of scholars such as Fullan (1998), a Canadian educational theorist, and knew that
transfer of practice, although commonly assumed, was little understood. ‘Transfer
theories of learning fail to recognise the complexity involved in educational change
and the difficulty embedding good practice’ (Skelton, 2004, p. 459). Skelton (2004)
found that most NTFS projects are limited in their capacity to transfer to other
contexts because they tend to ignore the wider context in which practices are located,
they are not sufficiently theorised and provide little detail about their research
methodology or paradigm. Fullan (1998) concluded that transfer is more a question
of inspiration than imitation (to insight and action), that reformers need a theory of
action to address local contexts as well as a theory of education; and that attention
must be given to changing the context of recipient organisations.
The Department for Education and Skills commissioned an empirical study Factors
Influencing the Transfer of Good Practice (Fielding et al., 2005) which may have
lessons for the CETL. This study looked at factors facilitating or constraining the
transfer of good practice between schools at school or individual level across a range
of government policies including between Beacon or Leading Edge Partnership
Schools. In each case the researchers examined how classroom or organisational
management practices transferred between the schools or individuals (selected for
excellence) and their partners (selected in some cases for their need to improve). The
researchers distinguished between the dissemination of information, which can lead
to the acquisition of potentially useful knowledge, and partnership activities, which
can support grounded changes in practice. They concluded that joint practice
‘development’ is a more appropriate term than ‘transfer of good practice’ since
transfer fails to recognise the mutuality of the process and the importance of both
partners developing new ways of working.
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Excellence and Equalities
I was very ambivalent about my success. Fifty thousand pounds prize money wasmost welcome, but is a drop in a comparative desert of scarce resources. Given achoice, I would have opted instead for an ESRC win, a gold in the Olympiad of theRAE. It would significantly add value to the RAE 2008 submission for mydepartment, crucial to my university determined to increase its research standingnationally and to my department determined to increase its research standing inthe university. Furthermore, collaboration and partnership underpin individualexcellence and ‘‘winning’’ sits uneasily on my shoulders as a feminist, academicwoman, and social worker.
Social work academics are likely to find teaching competitions particularly challenging
as they may be seen as antithetical to anti-oppressive practice. ‘A commitment to
ranking and competition is a part of an ideology which endorses structured inequalities
in the quality of public service provision’ (Rustin, 2003, p. 9). They present a particular
challenge to feminists such as myself, concerned to support values of collective action,
mutuality and equality and square these with the traditional male values of
competition, individualistic enterprise and inequalities (Gilligan, 1982).
We do not have evidence yet of the interaction of teaching competitions with minority
issues, such as gender, ethnicity or other less visible minority issues. Skelton (2004) barely
refers to such issues, although as seen earlier he does refer to Panel members as ‘white and
grey’. We have evidence of other kinds of inequalities in higher education and it would
seem reasonable to speculate that these will affect participation in and outcomes of
competitions. To take gender as one example we know that gender affects career
progression in higher education (e.g. Brooks, 1997); and, in social work education (e.g.
Cree, 1997; Lyons & Taylor, 2004). There is evidence that teaching quality processes are
female dominated and research quality processes are male dominated, with women
under-represented as producers and reviewers of research quality (Morley, 2001a), so we
might expect women to perform better in teaching competitions. However by 2005, 56%
of Teaching Fellows were male and 43% female. This would suggest that gender may be
influencing competitions unfavourably to women.
Returning to the ‘poison chalice’ theme, the other equalities issue that demands
attention is the status of teaching in relation to research. Skelton (2004) notes that of the
20 Fellows interviewed, three were promoted to professorial level following NTFS
recognition, but he also notes that two were in new universities and one was in a teaching
intensive department in an old university. The risk remains that ‘In some institutions and
departments gaining promotion on the basis of teaching excellence, or being given a
teaching award, could have serious negative consequences for your career. It would be
taken to indicate a lack of priority given to research’ (Gibbs & Habeshaw, 2002, p. 33).
Strategies for Developing Excellence Schemes
Given that excellence schemes appear set to increase, the overarching task is to build
knowledge about them to enable their development as equitable, transparent and fit
for purpose. This is essential if they are to develop credibility within their subject
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communities, and if claims for excellence are to be seen as robust rather than
rhetorical. There are five priorities.
The first priority is to establish a research strategy for higher education to provide
a base for setting research and development priorities. The Higher Education
Academy and a Research Council such as the ESRC must support this. Investment in
pedagogic research in higher education has been minimal yet is essential to inform
practice (Skelton, 2002; Universities UK, 2001). Such research would include a
systematic review of excellence in higher education and related fields and a study of
the range and scope of institutional level teaching excellence schemes. Large-scale
outcome oriented studies are needed as well as the more familiar small-scale
qualitative studies focusing on experience (Carpenter, 2005). Empirical studies of the
CETLs, which include formative, action and outcome-focused research, are essential.
A longitudinal cohort study of National Teaching Fellows, evaluating the
effectiveness of the scheme and its impact on the winners, their institutions and
their students is also needed. Research is needed into equalities issues and the
increasing competition agenda. Without this range of research, it would be
irresponsible at best for the government to divert such large sums of money into
teaching excellence schemes.
Secondly, ‘What excellent teaching is considered to consist of needs to be specified
unambiguously’ (Gibbs & Habeshaw, 2002, p. 5). Brown (2003) raises some relevant
questions about the nature of teaching excellence and I offer brief responses based on
the analysis in this paper. (i) Is excellence absolute or context free? My argument is
that the disciplinary context is highly significant. The evaluation of the Learning and
Teaching Support Network Subject Centres (2003) undertaken by a team at the
University of Lancaster, endorses the value of a discipline-based approach to teaching
(http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/centres/cset/majorprojects.htm). (ii) What are the indi-
cators of exemplary achievement? I would argue for a combination of core criteria
common to all disciplines and discipline-specific criteria, the latter possibly to be
proposed by the Subject Centres following appropriate consultation. I would suggest
that in addition to criteria about the ability to influence students, colleagues and the
wider community, the NTFS ‘illustrative characteristics’ of excellent teachers should
be more clearly profiled, particularly those in relation to developing innovation and
creativity, enhancing curiosity and enquiry, supporting independent learning and
responding to student diversity. (iii) What is the role of student feedback? It is
important but as indicated in the earlier discussion, student feedback must be
contextualised. (iv) Should excellent teachers engage in pedagogic research and
scholarship? The terms teaching excellence and scholarship are helpfully clarified by
Kreber (2002). She suggests that teaching ‘excellence’ is based on judgements of its
effectiveness by those who experienced it, whereas ‘scholarship’ entails disseminating
knowledge of teaching in a way that can be peer reviewed. On this basis, scholarship
must be included in the criteria for excellence, and it may include either empirical
study or conceptual development.
Questions such as these should be explored with a range of stakeholders. Subject-
specific stakeholders need a voice and in social work this would include the service
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users and carers who should ultimately benefit from excellent teaching, and practice
teachers based in social work agencies. Small focus groups used by Munson (1994)
could provide an exemplar for exploring different perspectives. The extensive
educational literature about processes to establish assessment criteria for student
learning may be useful (see for example, Biggs, 1999).
The third priority is that mechanisms for judging excellence need to withstand the
same scrutiny and analysis given to RAE panels (Gibbs & Habeshaw, 2002). Panels
must be clearly representative of the constituencies involved, with a diverse
membership, including education developers, pedagogic researchers and discipline-
based academics but also in social work education, service users and carers and
practice teachers. Furthermore, panel processes and outcomes must be rigorous and
transparent, particularly when the stakes are so high.
Fourth, we must develop knowledge about the transfer of practice from one site to
another. It would be illuminating to undertake research into a CETL and a ‘partner’
organisation, bringing together some of Fullan’s (1998) ideas with research
methodologies such as those used by Fielding and colleagues (2004) discussed earlier.
Finally, it is important to explore the implications of competition for a range of
equalities issues. Is there a risk that schemes to reward teaching further polarise
teaching and research, accelerating ‘teaching only’ contract staff and differentiating
research and teaching (Skelton, 2002)? Surveys of staff have shown that formal
recognition through promotions systems is regarded as the best way to reward good
teaching (Ramsden & Martin, 1996; Skelton, 2002; Allen, 2003). It is crucial to reward
both teaching and research through enabling career and professional development
and through equitable and adequate pay structures and adequate facilities. No
amount of prizes will make up for a situation where pay levels are generally low and
where ‘pay rewards for teaching are designed to exclude all but a very shiny few’
(Allen, 2003, p. 10).
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