The ABT Conference closed last week, and every delegate received a copy of our report. You may or may not have had a chance yet to read it, but we’d like to talk a bit more now about what’s next.
First of all, since the report went to the printing press on May Day, the release date of the TEF result was announced. Participating “providers” (i.e. HEIs that handed in a submission) will be informed – under embargo – about their results on June 12th, and all results and submissions will be made public on June 14th. Do keep checking our Blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts (@goldleaf2001) for on-time updates on this!
The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 has now passed into legislation and was published a fortnight ago; the full text can be accessed on the government website here.
The Act incorporated that a major and independent review will be carried out by 2019, which might change any of the aspects that are to be introduced in future, including linking TEF levels to tuition fees, subject-level TEF or a TEF for taught post-graduates.
The discussion about subject-level TEF and the metrics and bureaucracy to underpin this is moving forward; institutions are thinking about how to address it in future and much discussion is taking place. The universities aren’t content to await the results, they are grasping the action now to take their TEF offers into the future.
One example is the University of Manchester, which announced last week that it was to make a total of 171 staff redundant – 140 of them in teaching – and replace them with fewer and younger (and cheaper) lecturers, in order to “invest in [their] strategic priorities”, of which the TEF is known to be at the top of the list.
Gold Leaf 