The Teaching Excellence Framework: Discursive Institutionalism, Policy and Academic Discourse

Cornford, Alexander (2026) The Teaching Excellence Framework: Discursive Institutionalism, Policy and Academic Discourse. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

The Teaching Excellence Framework, by claiming to measure the quality of teaching in higher education institutions in the UK, represents a significant move in quality management, student choice, accountability and marketisation for universities. This study places its introduction and development into the context of historical changes in the way UK universities are funded and managed, as well as shifts in how governments position universities as drivers of social mobility and economic growth.

This research aimed to understand how teaching quality is framed in TEF policy, how it is discursively interpreted by academics and implemented by universities and their staff. Fifteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews were carried out with academics across universities, occupying a range of positions/roles in relation to TEF. Their responses are interwoven with text from six core policy documents on the TEF. The conceptual framework of discursive institutionalism has been used to support analysis of this data. This approach helps explain actions and reactions to the TEF policy framework based on agents’ institutional and ideational positions.

The findings reveal how academic staff seek to maintain the capacity to control (but not dominate) both the meaning of and ideas about teaching ‘excellence’ through their own discourse and in their practice. The coordinative/communicative discourse of policy and university leadership, maintaining a certain power over ideas, creates the ideational conditions for limited institutional change. However, institutional change is also affected by a perceived lack of cognitive argumentation in policy and process for the academic community (e.g. use of metrics as proxies to measure the quality of teaching at institutional and national level). Conflicting ideas which were identified in policy were either taken up or reformulated by academic staff, particularly at leadership level; at the same time, existing practices, often at individual and departmental levels were used to structure understandings about learning and teaching.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Education and Lifelong Learning
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	16 Mar 2026 11:57
Last Modified:	16 Mar 2026 11:57
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102338
DOI:

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