An accredited formal teaching qualification, including “competences required for all teaching staff” heralded a new era of professionalisation which would have put teaching on a par with research excellence.
A failure to deliver on those promises means UK higher education is left exposed to some serious challenges in the very near future.
At the recent Wonkhe Secret Life of Students event there was an onstage armchair chat with John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation from the Office for Students. John had some typically blunt appraisals of many aspects of current policy and practise in the HE sector but one in particular caught my ear; he bemoaned the apparent lack of assessment literacy shown by academic staff in universities. He contrasted this with his experience in the school education sector where he believes teachers are fully versed in fundamental concepts from assessment theory, such as reliability and validity.
An audience member challenged this (full disclosure; the audience member was me), pointing out a key difference between schools and HE; if someone is teaching in a school, they are normally qualified. They have been trained with a postgraduate qualification. Until recently, this was a regulatory requirement.
