Professionalising teaching in HE: the impact of an institutional fellowship scheme in the UK

The professionalisation of teaching in higher education has been increasingly prioritised across the globe in response to changes in the scale and nature of higher education brought about by massification, marketisation and managerialism. The UK experience has been characterised by the application of codified professional standards and this is of wider interest as perhaps the most developed attempt to formalise and systematise approaches to teacher development utilising such standards. Increasingly, this has focused on the ongoing development of existing staff in addition to new entrants to the profession. Institutional schemes underpinned by the United Kingdom Professional Standards Framework have rapidly spread throughout the sector offering a route for experienced staff to achieve fellowships of the UK Higher Education Academy. However, research into the effects of such schemes on individual participants and institutions has been limited. This article analyses the impact of such a scheme within the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett University in the UK, drawing on data derived from in-depth interviews with scheme participants. Practice theories were applied as a frame for analysis of the developmental impact of the scheme through exploration of the practices involved in participation and how these meshed with other practices related to teaching and learning. This suggested that whilst such schemes may be an acceptable form of retrospective benchmarking, the ongoing developmental impact may be limited.     

The University of Buckingham after Ten Years - A Tentative Evaluation

The University of Buckingham is now more than 10 years old. This would seem an opportune moment to evaluate the achievements of the only privately financed university in Britain. One might evaluate Buckingham from a number of standpoints but we have decided in this essay to evaluate it in the light of the purposes for which it was founded as expressed in the objectives laid down by its 'founding fathers'. We might instead have opted for such 'performance indicators' as admission standards, degrees conferred, wastage rates, post-graduation employment records, research grants awarded, and the like, in comparison with results achieved elsewhere in British higher education. But we think that little purpose would be served by such comparisons since Buckingham is too young an institution to have settled down to a steady state. Nevertheless, we have supplied relevant data below, which will allow the reader to form some judgement on where Buckingham stands in respect of these matters.