On Monday the Department for Education opened the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework: subject-level consultation (and parallel student survey) to obtain views from students, providers, employers and sector bodies on the proposed design of subject-level TEF. The current Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) assesses ‘provider-level’ undergraduate provision. However, subject-level TEF could start as early as 2020.
According to WONKHE “There’s nothing in the documents that would be unfamiliar to anyone who has been engaging with the ongoing TEF debate. Reading between the lines you can see that initial proposals underestimated the time and resources actually required to assess at subject level, and that the continuing pressure for statistical fixes for unusable data speaks of an unwillingness to provide caveats to students”.
The student survey will examine how applicants use a variety of data in determining which course to apply to, and should complement HEFCE data on the usefulness of Unistats and other sources.