University of the Year for Teaching Quality

Let’s start with a quotation:

“One of our big civic universities, Sheffield Hallam is enjoying something of a renaissance. Students have repeatedly given it good ratings for the quality of its teaching, but this year their assessments have propelled the university to a new high. Achieving sustained success in this area is hard, all the more so for a large – rather than niche – institution with 30,000 students. No university of a similar size delivers so well on teaching quality in our latest rankings.

It has ambitions to be the leading university in the world for applied learning and has embarked on a 15-year campus plan to deliver on that. Rooted firmly in the region it serves, Sheffield Hallam recruits heavily from some of the groups served least well by British universities and ensures they thrive once they enrol.”

When I got home and showed that extended quotation to my wife, she said ‘did you write that yourself?’ But I didn’t. That’s the full text of the Times and Sunday Times award to Sheffield Hallam of the title University of the Year for Teaching Quality. But if I had written it myself, I couldn’t have put it better: it captures everything: the sense of momentum and improvement – yes, “renaissance” – across the university. The focus on sustained success which has given us our highest ever student satisfaction score. The recognition of hard work. The ability to do impressive things on a large scale. The ambitions we have. Our commitment to place. Our mission for widening participation in higher education. Or determination that our students thrive.

It is incredibly gratifying to see the efforts and commitment of the university’s staff recognised in this way, and by the university guide which commands the most media attention each year. For me, that’s the most important feature of this: not so much the award and the title – which of course we will enjoy – but the recognition that so much collaborative and co-ordinated effort has been recognised.

There’s still a long way for us to go, and – inevitably – things will go wrong on our journey. It’s a rough and tough world, increasingly competitive and with resources increasingly constrained. But the Sunday Times award comes on the heels of other news which suggests that we are making real progress. Our research income doubled in 2018/9, with new and bigger awards for grants which will enable us to accelerate the impact of our research.   On Friday – the same day as the embargo on the University of the Year title was lifted – government also announced that it had awarded us University Enterprise Zone funding to develop further activity around the Advanced Well-Being Research Centre. And I was able to read, last week, glowing testimonials from students who had undertaken an extended experience at La Trobe, our strategic partner university in Australia.

This award will make a difference. It’ll make a difference to the way the university is perceived. It will make a difference, we are pretty sure, to applications and recruitment, nationally and internationally. Most of all I hope it will make a difference to the way we see ourselves: a bit more confident that we are doing the right things.

There’s always a danger with awards that you see them as verdicts rather than observations, as rear-view mirrors rather than milestones. Across the university, real progress has been made on important measures – we are one of only a small handful of universities where student satisfaction has risen consistently over three successive years. But there is more to be done to embed success and to deliver a really distinctive student experience. That’s why one of our highest priorities for 2019/20, as I explained at last week’s all staff addresses at both City and Collegiate, is to press forward with work on the Hallam Model: a crisp, coherent and enabling statement of the design principles for our curriculum.

For now, though, this blog is an opportunity to say thank you to the staff – academic and professional, frontline and back office, throughout this university who have made the award possible. It wouldn’t really be decent to quote that citation again, would it? Oh. Why not,

“One of our big civic universities, Sheffield Hallam is enjoying something of a renaissance. Students have repeatedly given it good ratings for the quality of its teaching, but this year their assessments have propelled the university to a new high. Achieving sustained success in this area is hard, all the more so for a large – rather than niche – institution with 30,000 students. No university of a similar size delivers so well on teaching quality in our latest rankings.

It has ambitions to be the leading university in the world for applied learning and has embarked on a 15-year campus plan to deliver on that. Rooted firmly in the region it serves, Sheffield Hallam recruits heavily from some of the groups served least well by British universities and ensures they thrive once they enrol.”

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