Teaching at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has been awarded Silver in the new government framework aiming to measure the teaching quality of higher education providers.
The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) attempts to measure a number of areas relevant to undergraduate education, including Teaching Quality, Learning Environment, Student Outcomes and Learning Gain.
Student satisfaction, retention rate and employment data have been used in the exercise as proxies for the assessment of teaching quality.
The three possible levels of award for participating institutions are Bronze, Silver and Gold, all of which can apply only to institutions that have already demonstrated that they exceed the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education’s baseline for quality.
QMUL, alongside a total of 299 universities, colleges and alternative providers of higher education, participated in the TEF exercise during 2016/17. Institutions will be able to keep their award for a maximum of three years.
Professor Rebecca Lingwood, Vice-Principal for Student Experience, Teaching and Learning, said: “Our Silver award demonstrates QMUL’s continued commitment to enhancing our student experience and learning environment.
“We aim to improve further with particular attention to helping our students into highly skilled graduate employment. This is an area we have already identified for attention via our new innovative degree programme, known as the QMUL Model.
“We want to ensure that we not only widen access but also engage, retain, and importantly, widen opportunities for all our students, irrespective of their backgrounds.”
A ‘TEF lessons-learned’ exercise will be undertaken by the Department for Education in conjunction with the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and a ‘far-reaching independent review’ of the TEF will be conducted in 2019 and will report to Parliament.
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