A recent international survey concerning what academics themselves believe would have most impact on improving the quality of teaching in universities found that in every country surveyed (including the UK) the method ranked first was not course review, or quality assessment, or the use of student feedback, or training in teaching methods, or conferences such as the one this paper was presented at, but promotion on the basis of teaching excellence (Wright et al., 1994). In the USA, following the Boyer report for the Carnegie Commission which identified the excessive dominance of rewards for research excellence as one of the major obstacles to achieving quality in teaching, there have been large-scale Washington-funded initiatives to develop sound methodologies for rewarding excellent teachers (cf. Anderson, 1993). Most of these initiatives have involved the use of ‘teaching portfolios’ or ‘teaching profiles’: ways of documenting individuals’ experience and excellence in teaching.