Staff Development in Universities: Should There be a Staff College?

Drawing on 18 years of experience in university staff development the author considers the way staff training is regarded by academics and relates it to the concept of 'professionalism' among university teachers. He describes a two-year in-service course for teachers in higher education as an illustration of one form a professional training might take and argues the case for soundly basing such training on considerations of principle and theory. Changing attitudes and perceptions is perhaps more important than learning classroom skills, or management technique. Training should be informed by research but the author illustrates ambivalent attitudes rewards research on universities with a deception of recent personal experience in connection with a national research project on examiners. The inseparability of institutional research and staff development is illustrated with an account of a stuff development exercise associated with the introduction of staff appraised schemes. Lessons are dram from each of the illustrations to suggest some of the key characteristics desirable in a staff college for universities.