GuildHE has responded to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Green Paper consultation: Fulfilling our potential: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice

GuildHE welcomes the government’s focus on raising teaching standards and improving access to higher education. We also welcome the government’s open and consultative approach. As one of the two officially recognised, representative bodies for UK higher education, we look forward to continuing to work with government on implementing the Teaching Excellence Framework.

We recognise the Teaching Excellence Framework provides a real opportunity to enhance teaching within universities and raise the profile of good teachers but there are clearly many potential pitfalls along the way that we need to avoid which we will highlight in our response.

We agree with the government that: “Innovation and diversity in higher education provision are crucial to our ability to maintain our international reputation and ensure the highest quality university experience for students”. By 2020, GuildHE wants to see a sector that is more distinctive, more diverse, more inclusive and stronger as a result. Diversity is key to excellence. We agree that a diverse sector needs to be underpinned by a fair and equitable regulatory framework for all types of higher education providers. As such a framework can only be fully implemented through changes to primary legislation, we urge the government to introduce a higher education Bill at the earliest opportunity. We believe that regulatory reform by government should explicitly embrace co-regulation with the higher education sector.

You can view our full response here: GuildHE response to the Higher Education Green Paper