This week, the Association of National Teaching Fellows (ANTF) submitted their response to the TEF Green Paper consultation, Fulfilling our potential: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice, published by BIS last November.
The ANTF response was submitted on behalf of members — including me — of the UK National Teaching Fellow community as represented by the Committee of the Association of National Teaching Fellows; over 150 NTFs contributed to this document through earlier TEF consultations and two ‘pop-up’ meetings.
As per the response summary, as a community we are naturally extremely supportive of promoting teaching excellence in UK HEIs, but concerned about the suitability, quality and robustness of some of the proposed metrics:
National Teaching Fellows are delighted that the government is aiming to recognise the importance of excellent teaching and acknowledge the value of professionalism, giving teaching equal status with research in universities. While it is necessary to rely principally on existing metrics in the first year, we argue that measuring teaching excellence is not a simple or straightforward task. There are widespread and genuine worries that insufficient detail is provided in the Green Paper on the metrics for a teaching excellence framework. We argue that establishing the right metrics through the technical consultation is crucial in ensuring that the framework is valid and acceptable to all stakeholders. We are keen that any measures used to recognise excellent teaching accurately evidence improvements which add value to the student experience, brought about by interactions between HEI teachers and students, rather than extraneous factors representing existing differences in the level of advantage of the student body in different institutions. National Teaching Fellows and CANTF as their representatives are a body of expert practitioners who can usefully contribute both to the technical consultation and to the expert panels proposed for phase two of the process.
Download the full consultation response (PDF), primarily responding to questions 2-11.
Digital, Data & Policy 
The HE White Paper — Higher education: success as a knowledge economy — was published today, detailing the government’s plans to reform the higher education and research system.
Also, the 618 responses to the TEF Green Paper have been made available on the original consultation page.