Professor Joy Carter, Vice Chancellor of the University of Winchester and Chair of GuildHE gave evidence to the BIS Select Committee 1st December as part of their Inquiry into assessing the quality of higher education, following GuildHE’s submission of written evidence.

Professor Carter highlighted the importance of recognising the excellence in diversity that there is across the higher education sector. This diversity emphasises the difficulty of just using a set of metrics to identify excellence, going on to highlight the importance of giving equal weighting to the institutional narrative that would sit alongside the metrics to provide a wider context to the data and be reviewed by a panel of peers.

She also suggested that the link between the TEF and raising fees should be given careful thought for the potential perverse incentives that it might create. Professor Carter ended by highlighting the important role of satisfied and engaged staff in order to deliver high quality teaching and therefore the role of reward and recognition will be key to the TEF as it develops.