ABSTRACT
In a previous publication I stated how important it was for teaching excellence to be subjected to serious intellectual debate (Skelton, 2005: 167–170). This was partly because, at that time, initiatives to recognise and reward teaching excellence had gathered pace yet there was an absence of in-depth discussion about these initiatives, their unintended effects and how they related to broader understandings about the nature and purpose of higher education. The NTFS for teachers in England and Northern Ireland typified the overall trend: here was a national scheme with high material and cultural significance (each of the award winners received £50,000; institutions increasingly began to run award schemes based on NTFS criteria) and yet there was little deliberation about the meaning of ‘teaching excellence’ in the planning meetings of the National Advisory Panel that devised the criteria for the scheme (Skelton, 2005: 49–51). I also noted in the same publication (ibid.: 161) that much of the existing research into teaching excellence was of an operational kind – focusing on the extent to which schemes to promote teaching excellence had been successful within their own terms of reference. This approach to research failed to engage with the underlying assumptions of schemes, their implicit understandings of excellence and the values informing judgements about quality.
