The UK is home to an amazing collection of world-leading specialist institutions, leading the fields in areas as diverse as the arts, health, business, engineering, and science. Yet UK higher education policy routinely misunderstands or overlooks the needs of these institutions despite their impact and role in revolutionising their fields.
The proposal to extend Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) participation requirements to more small specialist providers, and to bring postgraduate-only institutions into TEF for the first time, is a prime example of this. Policy is still too often designed around large, comprehensive universities.
These specialist institutions are deeply invested in the student experience, often with intensive teaching models, highly-specialised equipment and spaces, and tailored support reflecting the professional demands of specific industries. They share the mission of providing high quality education and student support that actively benefits both graduates and the UK economy.
However, rather than developing meaningful measures of quality for a diverse sector, the current proposals on TEF expansion appear to assume a predominantly undergraduate and comprehensive university context, embedding expectations around scale, data, and process that do not translate easily to postgraduate-only or specialist provision. The impact of this approach on providers who have not previously been part of TEF – whether through size or through being postgraduate-only – creates structural disadvantages in addition to short-term adjustment issues.
Misalignment
If an institution hasn’t participated in TEF before, its work around student experience and outcomes – no matter how high quality – will not be aligned with the data and processes required by the new framework. Smaller specialists have no economies of scale and run with no slack. Participating in TEF will mean adding the costs of new staff, or at the very least additional pressures on already stretched small teams.
The risk, however, is not just administrative burden, but distortion of teaching-intensive, specialist pedagogies. To create a TEF model that is capable of recognising fundamentally different educational designs, particularly those built around intensive, specialist, and professionally-embedded teaching, the Office for Students (OfS) will need both time and a wide range of inputs. Representatives of specialist institutions joining the new OfS provider panel is welcome, but with many experts already involved in REF 2029, the breadth of specialist advisers and assessors needed will be in short supply, or only available if they have left academia.
Postgraduate-only institutions face additional pressures. The proposal to link the TEF and access and participation plans (APPs) overlooks the fact that APPs are currently primarily designed for undergraduate institutions. For postgraduate-dominated institutions with highly international cohorts, outcomes data must also reflect global graduate destinations, as UK-centric employment measures risk under-representing success in internationally competitive creative and professional labour markets.
The upshot
All of this matters. First, the current TEF proposals suggest using results to determine funding, particularly world-leading specialist funding, which is critical to specialists who face high costs of teaching delivery. Second, the UK’s specialist institutions are prominent parts of a highly competitive global academic environment. Poor student experience rankings due to an inappropriately calibrated system would harm student recruitment at home and internationally with serious financial and reputational consequences.
The Royal College of Art and many other specialist institutions are ready to engage with the OfS, and welcome the chance to help develop a TEF process that is informed by detailed understanding, that respects nuance, and that is fair and proportionate for smaller institutions.
However, we need to be mindful of the additional pressures that even this level of engagement will create in lean institutions. Consideration should be given to funding streams to support small specialists – in particular with pilots or with releasing much-needed expert staff to act as assessors and advisers.
Timing is also critical. Institutions new to the TEF need sufficiently early sight of benchmarks to enable planning within very tight resource envelopes. Achieving a fair and considered set of measures and a proportionate implementation approach feels challenging given the stated aim of all providers being assessed by autumn 2030. The postgraduate aspect of the new TEF proposals in particular is light on detail about how this will work for the full range of higher education institutions.
Accepting that evaluation of the changes will continue on to at least 2035, and that the first assessments of these new institutions will generate unexpected challenges in practice, it would be high risk to link results to funding in this first phase. The ask here is not to avoid scrutiny, but to ensure that TEF enacts a basic principle of regulatory fairness: institutions entering a framework for the first time should not face financial consequences before the system has been tested, evaluated, and refined in practice. First-time institutions should also be supported through additional feedback and discussions to ensure they can learn and improve for their next assessment.
Many of the world’s leading subject-specialist institutions are based in the UK. They are highly ranked and globally sought after. The Royal College of Art, for example, has topped the art and design world subject rankings for 11 consecutive years now, and we know that providing an outstanding education to our students is essential to our world-leading position. I welcome the opportunity to develop an assessment system that accurately captures what makes the RCA and other specialist institutions successful, and that also supports us in further strengthening our teaching provision and graduate outcomes.
But for that system to work, it is essential to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach.