Teaching excellence in higher education: critical perspectives

Across the globe, contemporary higher education policy discourses are being driven increasingly by international league tables, market competition, and the dominance of prestige culture, with notions of ‘excellence’ framing both sector-wide responses and institutional practices (Stevenson, Whelan, and Burke 2017). A major critique emerging across the research literature is that the global HE sector is being profoundly reshaped by these processes of neoliberalism, which are driven by economic imperatives to develop ‘global, entrepreneurial, corporate, commercialised universities’ (Morley 2011, 224 in Stevenson, Burke, and Whelan 2014). Whilst this is an increasingly global phenomenon it is, however, being felt particularly sharply in the UK. In November 2015, the UK Government Department for Business and Skills published a Green Paper for consultation entitled ‘Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice’ (BIS 2015). This and the subsequent 2016 White Paper ‘Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice’ (BIS 2016) have ignited controversy about the potential effects on the English higher education sector. The essence of these proposals is to introduce the assessment of teaching at the level of HEIs, via a ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’ which would allow institutions to increase fees, depending on the results of the exercise. This set of initiatives has been accompanied by a rhetoric of ‘placing students at the centre’ of higher education, with an espoused emphasis on student social mobility and ‘choice’. As such, these papers and their ethos may appear benign, or even progressive, appearing to hold universities to account and defend the interests of students by rewarding a formal demonstration of teaching ‘quality’. However, the content andmethodology of the proposals have been roundly critiqued by academic and student groups for underscoring a marketised model of higher education (Madriaga and Morley 2016; Stevenson, Whelan, and Burke 2017). This has arguably further entrenched the highly problematic notion of the student as fee-paying ‘customer’ seeking value for money, engaged in a financial transaction with the university for private gain in terms of employability as an individual. The degree – and to an extent the graduate – is cast as a product, with universities forced to act as competitors fighting for market share. The end result – arguably – will be the accelerated reproduction of social privilege, with ‘elite’ institutions enabled to charge ever-higher fees in a context of prohibitive student debt, restricting opportunities to a privileged minority (Stevenson, Whelan, and Burke 2017). These proposals have also been criticised for seeking to relax access to the sector by for-profit providers, whilst undermining the independence of higher education quality assurance with a proposed ‘Office for Students’. Although this is a UK-based initiative (applied to England), it reflects a broader move in higher education internationally. Neoliberal imperatives have led to the marketisation of higher education across the globe, with ‘student satisfaction’, research and teaching league tables, branding, and competition for students framing such moves (Burke, Stevenson, and Whelan 2015, 30). As such our focus on excellence, prestige and teaching-performance league tables is of relevance in a range of educational contexts. This special issue sets out to interrogate and critique these developments from a variety of contexts and standpoints as follows.