The University of Liverpool has been awarded the highest rating, Gold, in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2023.
Run by the Office for Students (OfS), TEF is a national scheme that aims to encourage higher education providers to improve and deliver excellence in the areas that undergraduate students care about the most: teaching, learning and achieving positive outcomes from their studies.
The TEF does this by assessing and rating universities and colleges for excellence above a set of minimum requirements for quality and standards across the range of its undergraduate courses and subjects.
The TEF panel rated a number of elements of the University’s provision as outstanding, including:
- Teaching on my course
- Learning resources
- Approaches to supporting student success
- Continuation and completion rates
- Progression rates
- Research, innovation, scholarship, professional practice and employer engagement
- Staff professional development and academic practice.
Professor Tim Jones, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool, said: “Our Gold rating in TEF 2023 underlines our commitment to world class teaching and learning, with teaching delivered by leading experts and research-connected curricula across our courses. Employability is embedded throughout our undergraduate programmes, and our graduates enjoy high employability rates. We will be making sure we keep up the hard work to continue to give our students the best possible experience and help them to achieve their individual goals.”
Vasiliki Samuels, President, Liverpool Guild of Students said: “We’re really pleased that the University of Liverpool has been awarded Gold in the Teaching Excellence Framework. Working on the student submission was a great opportunity to involve student feedback directly in the process.
“We look forward to continuing to work closely with the University, expanding on good practice in the institution, as well as continuing to amplify the student voice and improve the educational experience.”
The TEF panel rated the inclusion of student voice at Liverpool to be very high quality with some outstanding features and the panel specifically noted the embedding of student voices across multiple layers of activity in relation to the University’s strategy and policy development.
The TEF panel also noted the “unusually wide range of examples” of research, innovation and professional practice being brought together into a suite of curricular and co-curricular opportunities. The diverse ways in which research is fed into the syllabus, developing students’ understanding of research processes and engaging them in enquiry-based projects as producers of knowledge, were specifically referenced. So too were the growing number of student experience enterprise-related activities and the use of employers at every stage; from supplying real life data to contextualise learning content to providing authentic project briefs for collaborative group tasks.
The TEF 2023 Gold rating is valid for four years.