Academic careers have long run on two different clocks. The research clock is unforgiving but at least legible; its demand condensed into a phrase that every early-career academic learns to dread. Publish, or perish. The teaching clock has been harder to read, and for much of the sector’s recent history, work centred on teaching offered little that resembled a route upward. That has begun to change, as institutions build education-focused career pathways and promote a growing body of staff whose primary contribution lies in teaching and learning. The change is welcome and overdue. Yet the terms on which recognition now arrives warrant careful attention, because they may be importing an expectation that suits teaching rather poorly.
The expectation is innovation. Across promotion criteria for education, the word recurs with a frequency that would be reassuring if anyone could say with confidence what it meant. It sits, largely undefined, as the quality that separates the promotable from the merely competent, and its meaning appears to shift as staff move up the grades. At entry level it can look optional, a desirable extra that strengthens a case. Higher up it hardens into a requirement, so that progression comes to depend on a demonstrated capacity to produce the new. What counts as new and how much of it is enough tend to be left to local interpretation, which is how similar activity comes to be read generously in one department and dismissed in another.
An undefined criterion does two things at once. It undermines fairness, since consistency is difficult to maintain when the standard cannot be plainly stated. And it shapes behaviour, since people respond, reasonably enough, to what they believe will be rewarded. Where the reward attaches to visible novelty, the incentive is to generate visible novelty, whether or not the teaching required it. Practices are introduced, replaced and rebranded at a pace that leaves little room to establish whether any of them worked. Evaluation, which is slow and frequently inconclusive, is quietly deferred in favour of the next initiative, because that is what the promotion case seems to call for.
When the currency and the craft diverge
This is where reward and enhancement can be seen to pull against one another. The improvement of teaching, as those who have led it tend to recognise, is seldom a matter of invention. It proceeds by identifying what is not working, testing a considered response, retaining what holds up and setting aside what does not, and doing so in a way colleagues can build on. Good practice accumulates. It is refined across successive cohorts and shared between colleagues, and a considerable part of its value lies in its being unoriginal, in the sense that it has been tried, evidenced and made dependable. A reward system that prizes reinvention risks treating this cumulative work as insufficiently distinctive to merit recognition, whilst crediting the eye-catching pilot that has yet to prove itself.
A related difficulty lies in the individualism the criterion assumes. Innovation, as promotion frameworks tend to construe it, is authored. It belongs to a person, who can name it in an application and present it as evidence of a singular contribution. Teaching, though, is a collective endeavour rather more often than institutions care to acknowledge. Curriculum design, assessment practice and the small adjustments that make a module work are rarely the achievement of one mind, and their benefit is realised only as others take them up. A framework that sees the individual innovator more readily than the colleague who quietly strengthens a shared foundation may be rewarding a narrower thing than it supposes, and possibly the wrong one.
None of this indicates that novelty has no place. Some educational problems do call for genuinely new responses, and the sector would be poorer without those willing to attempt them. The concern is narrower and, arguably, more practical. When novelty becomes an expectation rather than a response to need, it ceases to function as a marker of quality and becomes a performance that staff learn to stage. The activity continues, the applications are written and the promotions are made, yet the relationship between what is rewarded and what actually assists students may grow steadily more tenuous.
What a reward framework says about an institution
Reward and recognition are seldom discussed as instruments of institutional strategy, though they function as one. Promotion criteria are among the clearest statements an institution makes about what it values, read closely by everyone whose advancement depends upon them and acted upon accordingly. If those criteria reward individual novelty, an institution should not be surprised to find a culture that produces individual novelty, nor to notice that its enhancement strategy, which very likely speaks of evidence, collaboration, and sustained improvement, describes a different set of behaviours from those its reward system elicits. The distance between the two is not always visible from the centre, since each is owned by a different part of the organisation and neither is obliged to reconcile with the other.
That distance may repay examination. It would be reasonable for a governing body or an executive team to ask whether the institution’s account of good teaching, as expressed in its promotion criteria, aligns with its account of good teaching in its strategy for educational quality. The two are often drafted separately, by different hands and to different ends, so some divergence is to be expected. A pronounced divergence, though, tends to produce the quiet frustration of staff who are asked to collaborate and improve whilst sensing that what actually secures promotion is something else again. Sector work on the reward and recognition of teaching has been pointing this way for some years, towards criteria that credit collective contribution and evidenced improvement rather than novelty alone, although how far institutional practice has followed remains uneven.
The question this leaves is not readily settled, and perhaps ought not to be. If innovation is a flawed currency for teaching esteem, what would a sounder one recognise, and could it be stated clearly enough to be applied with any fairness? How might an institution reward the patient and shared work of making teaching reliably good without discouraging the occasional leap that genuinely moves it forward? And how many institutions, asked plainly what their promotion criteria are for, could give an answer that their own strategy for educational quality would recognise?