The last decade since I began preparing for the first QAA Subject Review visit to my department in 1993 has been the most momentous of my career in terms of teaching and learning. Unprecedented levels of funding ear-marked for teaching development have incentivised a period of extraordinary change. In that context, I have benefited enormously from interaction between the programmes and collaboration across the colleague networks created by the TQEF initiative. My own learning has been hugely stimulated, my experience enriched and my career path made interestingly complicated!
I have found myself involved in every strand of learning and teaching initiative promoted by the TQEF. In 1996 I became an FDTL1 project manager, leading the University of Nottingham PADSHE Project (Personal and Academic Development for Students in Higher Education), a project which anticipated the implementation of the HE Progress File announced by Dearing in his report of 1997. Bidding successfully for that FDTL1 project in the wake of subject review, I could not have known what was still to come: the setting up of the National Co-ordination Team, the creation of the Learning and Teaching Support Network, the Innovations programme, the inauguration of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme and the development of two phases of institutional Learning and Teaching Strategies. Even less could I have known then that I would find myself interacting with all these initiatives and able, through them, to build a long-term involvement with an innovation in learning and teaching, the HE Progress File, which promises to run and run.
To receive £250,000 funding in 1996 for an FDTL1 project based in departments of English was to experience a kind of transformation. Funding on this scale for any purpose was rare indeed in faculties of Arts and Humanities. It seemed at the time a more than acceptable sweetener', after the trials of subject review, to be invited to work with other English departments to develop more widely an initiative highlighted in our subject review report. But of course the requirement to work collaboratively with other institutions across the sector presented a new challenge. It plunged us into the task of trying to move beyond the culture of fierce institutional autonomy which had characterised the UK higher education sector for so long.
It has been fascinating to watch the interplay of institutional and discipline-based initiatives under the TQEF programme. The moves to acknowledge subject-specific cultures, the bids to harness the persuasiveness of peer example all these have produced successes in raising awareness, stimulating creativity and lifting standards across the sector. The NTFS scheme, designed to raise the profile of teaching through awards to individuals, has also fostered the concept of collaboration and cross-sector working. NTFs have a sense of belonging to a growing body of fellows, a permanent grouping on the UK HE scene, networking with each other but also working with LTSN subject centres nationally and with similar groups internationally, enjoying contemplating and learning from ever wider horizons of experience, practice and pedagogic imagination.
Before we had learning and teaching strategies, the external examiner system shone a certain amount of public light on developments in learning and teaching within departments. The two rounds of institutional learning and teaching strategies under the TQEF have produced a public articulation of learning and teaching rationales for whole institutions, visibly interfacing with major priorities of national policy. Perhaps the main reason why my own work made contact at some level with every part of the TQEF initiative was that, in spite of springing from subject review, the original FDTL1 project was actually generic in nature, not discipline-specific, and thus came into contact with institutional and national policy. The project became, according to one enthusiastic outside commentator, something of a beacon' in the sector, and possibly an influence on the progress of national policy. When the Dearing Report came out, including the recommendation for a UK Progress File for HE, the theme of our project was caught up in a national agenda for change which is still ongoing. The whole of HE is aiming to introduce progress files by 2005-06, under a UUK/SCoP/LTSN/QAA policy recommendation strengthened by further policy developments such as those on employability and on widening participation.
Another very powerful lever for change has been the expansion of C&IT for learning and teaching during the lifetime of the TQEF. The inter-institutional networking created through the original FDTL project led to a new partnership between Nottingham and Newcastle universities to take the whole PADSHE development into C&IT. This move attracted new project funding from the DfES, and at a second stage, from the Innovations programme. Moreover, as a learning and teaching innovation with enormous C&IT potential, related work in-house at Nottingham merited inclusion in the University's first Learning and Teaching Strategy.
The excitement of project work is that sense of being at the leading edge always moving outwards, upwards and forwards. It has, in my experience, been very much about persuading others to embrace change and hooking into ever-evolving national policy targets to secure commitment. But there are dangers too, especially in the pressure to move forward into the next phase before fully completing the first. This, for me, was the beauty of the National Teaching Fellowship award: it enabled me to complete the holistic, student-centred interpretation of the PADSHE concept I had always envisaged, but seemed unable to attend to, as long as the rush of new possibilities around Progress Files and Lifelong Learning continued to carry me too far ahead. At last I could go back to working with staff and students, analysing user needs and potential back, too, into my subject base, networking with other NTFs in my discipline. Achieving progress in student learning and teacher practice, which must always be at the heart of educational development, does not compare, I reflect, with piloting innovations or even contributing to policy change at the institutional or national level it presents a much greater challenge.