Thanks mainly to the excellent work of the Pearce Review, the primary aim of the TEF is no longer to inform student choice but to encourage higher education providers to enhance the quality of their provision.
This is an important change.
The TEF does not tell potential applicants anything about the quality of individual degree courses and, given the duration of the award and the age of the data it is based on, only tells them what an institution was like three to seven years before they might study there.
However, despite this change to the aims of the TEF, the categories used in TEF2023 could inform student choice in a way that has a devastating effect on the HE system.
