I have a confession to make – I don’t have a teaching qualification. I am an award winning educator, National Teaching Fellow and a Principal Fellow of AdvanceHE. But I am entirely self-taught, and have never had any formal training in how to teach within HE.

My career illustrates the difference between work based training, taught qualifications and professional recognition. I haven’t really done any formal training – I haven’t done a PostGraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PCAP), or an MA or EdD. All of my formal qualifications were as a scientist, not an educator. However, I have been self-motivated enough to learn my educational craft informally. This includes participation in communities of practice, reading SoTL papers, attending conferences and collaborating with others, as well as reflecting on my own teaching and evaluating my practice. This has all shaped my teaching practice, and feedback from my students suggests that my approaches are effective, inclusive and lead to high student outcomes.

For me, this experience has led to the highest levels of professional recognition. This form of qualification is increasingly mainstream within UK HE, typically through fellowship of AdvanceHE. While I think that AdvanceHE fellowship is a very valuable scheme for professional recognition, even as a PFHEA I don’t think it has helped me plan a more engaging lesson or design a better assignment. I’ve learned to do that myself, but maybe some training would have helped me avoid some mistakes along the way. Being frank, the value of fellowship has been for me and my career, not for my students and their learning.

I recognise that I am relatively unusual as a younger academic in that I haven’t done a PCAP. Most institutions require new teaching staff to complete a PCAP when they start. However when I started my first permanent lectureship I already had ~10 years of teaching experience, enough to obtain FHEA. I was therefore exempt from having do PCAP, and actively encouraged not to do the programme so that I had more capacity to develop my teaching and establish scholarship and evaluation projects. I’m not sure that I would have made a different choice a second time around, but it does make me feel uncomfortable in my identity as an educational leader.

What ‘counts’ as a teaching qualification in UK HE?

The landscape of teaching qualifications in UK HE is complex, as there isn’t a single recognised qualification or the equivalent of Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in the school sector. The Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) collates data on whether staff working within UK HE have an academic teaching qualification. HESA define multiple categories of qualification, and do not assume any sort of hierarchy within these:

• Institutional qualification validated against the Professional Standards Framework (e.g. PostGraduate Certificate in Academic Practice [PCAP])
• National Teaching Fellowship
• PGCE in Higher Education, Further Education or Secondary Education
• Accreditation of teacher status by a professional body
• AdvanceHE Fellowship (AFHEA, FHEA, SFHEA or PFHEA)
• SEDA Fellowship/Senior Fellowship
• Other HE relevant teaching qualification obtained either in the UK or overseas

HESA therefore do count professional recognition through fellowship as a teaching qualification. I think the two are distinct and it is perhaps unhelpful to conflate the two. HESA combine both routes in their publically available data, so I count as qualified as far as the sector is concerned. [The HESA data on teaching qualifications by institution is fascinating in its own right (HESA Table 10), but that is a topic for another day …]

What value does a teaching qualification have that I haven’t benefitted from?

Without having done a formal qualification, it is a little difficult to say what I’ve missed out on! However looking at the content of my own institutional programme I think there are some really practical things that would have been useful. For example, we teach the diamond lesson plan model as a robust way of structuring teaching sessions to effectively embed active learning. While most of my classes mirror this structure, learning a more formal template early on would have prevented a lot of trial and error! Our programme also gives staff the opportunity to design a hypothetical module before having to do one for real. It has to be a good thing to that staff get to ‘play’ with ideas and get feedback before actually designing and delivering a flawed module with real students on it.

However, there are significant issues with the way the sector delivers teacher training. The sector is very reliant on a one year PCAP programme leading to FHEA as the model of teaching qualification, but this often isn’t what staff need. I know many colleagues who have had to do PCAP struggle with (i) the sheer time commitment required when they are also trying to establish their research groups and get their first independent grants, and (ii) found that PCAP was far too late to help them through their first teaching.

In my opinion, new staff don’t immediately need a PCAP, they need a short ‘essentials’ course when they very first start teaching, which might be at any time of year. They also need to be supported with a proper teaching mentorship scheme, and a constructive peer observation process to help them improve. I have recently become Director of a unit that delivers a PCAP, and one thing I want to move towards is a much more responsive essentials model that ensures all staff have support from the start. Staff shouldn’t have to wait until the next annual PCAP cohort, which might not start until a staff member has been teaching for almost a year. PCAP is valuable once staff have got a bit more established, but it often doesn’t meet the immediate needs of new teaching staff.

So does it matter that I don’t have a teaching qualification?

For me personally, I’m genuinely not sure. I think there are tips and tricks I could have picked up with some more formal training. I might also be a bit more confident with some of the underlying theoretical aspects of education. I’ve never been able to think in terms of epistemologies and ontologies, and am still grappling with theoretical and conceptual frameworks. But I’m not sure that that has made any difference to my teaching practice, and I think that we often conflate the academic discipline of education with the practice of teaching. In talking to many colleagues across the sector, a lot of PCAP courses have more theory than is needed, but not enough focus on more challenging aspects of practice.

However, for the sector I think it matters more than we typically think it does. Compared to schools and FE colleges, universities are astonishingly unprofessional when it comes to staff development. There are vast numbers of people teaching in HE who either have no teaching qualification at all, or who have professional recognition of their educational experience but no actual training. I don’t think making everyone like me do a PCAP is the answer, and is likely to antagonise many highly experienced and capable staff.

As a sector we need to think more clearly about the difference between training, qualifications and professional recognition. We also need to stop relying on inflexible models of PCAP for new starters. As above, PCAP is often flawed even for its target population. However we also need to think about what training and development established educators need. What training needed is needed for experienced individuals like me to take their practice to the next level? How do we support those who have been teaching in HE for years but who really need some training to bring their practice up to expected standards? How do we create a culture where all educators take pride in their learning, training and professional development? How can we deliver these flexibly in a way that educators actually need? These are big questions for the sector and for institutions, and for academic development units delivering these programmes. We should be delivering the development staff actually need to be effective educators.