Institutional Accreditation and the Professionalisation of Teaching in the HE Sector

Lucy Spowart and Rebecca Turner

A chapter in Higher Education - New Approaches to Accreditation, Digitalization, and Globalization in the Age of Covid from IntechOpen

Abstract: Institutional accreditation is an integral part of moves to professionalise teaching and learning in higher education (HE). Despite this growing trend, there is a paucity of literature which examines the benefits and challenges of institutional accreditation. In this chapter we draw on survey data collected in 2020 from 55 HE institutions globally which are accredited by Advance HE to award Fellowships. These teaching Fellowships are aligned to the UK Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Learning (UKPSF). Findings show that institutional accreditation supports the career development of teaching-focused academics and impacts on teaching and learning in a number of ways. These impacts include providing an external benchmark, raising the profile and quality of teaching and encouraging teaching-related professional development, including engagement with scholarship in teaching and learning. Accreditation was also found to align with neoliberal agendas of quality, league tables and marketization. The perennial issue of how to evaluate the impact on student learning is something respondents continue to grapple with. Finally, these data demonstrate there is a clear need to develop a more systematic and embedded approach to evaluation that captures the outcomes of teaching-related professional development.

Keywords: Accreditation; Benchmarking; Professionalisation of teaching; Professional standards framework (PSF); Impact evaluation; HEA Fellowships; Career development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:245653

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.99805

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