ABSTRACT
The need to ‘enhance the quality of teaching and learning’ emerged as a key strategic objective in English higher education in the early 1990s. Without ever defining ‘quality enhancement’, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) used ‘strategic investment’ (Brown, 2007, p. 101), to support a plethora of funding ‘initiatives’ designed to influence English universities to ‘promote and enhance high quality learning and teaching’ (HEFCE, 1998). Central to the strategy was the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (TQEF), which belied its piecemeal origins by its neat structure of three strands: the institutional strand, the subject strand and the individual strand. With alarming confidence, or perhaps simply bravado, the Funding Council announced that its aims to enhance teaching and learning would be ‘delivered’ through the allocation of funds from the TQEF (HEFCE, 1999). The culmination of this policy of using state funding as an incentive to ‘deliver’ quality enhancement (QE) was the £340 million initiative to create Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs).
