Professionally, I have had the privilege to ‘grow up’ in a unique environment – a relatively small and specialist college offering Higher Education (HE), which five years ago gained University Title, having achieved Taught Degree Awarding Powers in 2017. Over the 25+ years, I have seen a few higher education policies, quality assurance and enhancement sector requirements come and go. We (at Hartpury University) enjoyed success in the Quality Assurance Agency Higher Education Review, using it as an opportunity to showcase what we did best, alongside demonstrating our ability to fundamentally meet sector benchmarks.
TEF (2017) went really well, achieving Gold after successfully demonstrating our ability to provide an outstanding student experience (despite the data potentially not). So we entered TEF 2023 with mixed emotions – a rare opportunity in today’s regulatory environment to showcase our very best, balanced with the fear of not!
For us, one of the hardest parts of TEF was the consultation phase. At the time, Hartpury was still establishing itself as a university while trying to engage in an evolving higher education regulatory landscape. While the latter was challenging for the whole sector, I think that two of us at Hartpury were potentially working our way through between 15 and 20 industry consultations, including the TEF.
The reality of being a small institution (just over 2,000 students at that time), was that the consultations fell on the same senior staff who were also keeping the ship afloat while coming out of the stormy waters of Covid-19, rising costs and flat-lining income. Realistically, we had to pick and choose our battles, while utilising the invaluable support of organisations like GuildHE. It was not ideal, and not easy.
