Are technicians a hidden indicator of teaching excellence?

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Tim Savage. Educational consultant at Tim Savage Consulting.

In my analysis of Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) submissions, I found that between 2017 and 2023, the number of universities referencing technicians in their claims of teaching excellence increased from just under a fifth to a little over a third. Indeed, in 2023, 78 of 222 providers included technical staff in their narratives. Subsequently, I revisited the provider statements to ask a different question: is there an association between references to technicians in provider statements and the TEF ratings providers receive?

The pattern is striking: providers that referenced technicians were twice as likely to achieve an Overall Gold rating as those that did not. Furthermore, providers that did not reference technicians were more than three times as likely to receive Bronze or Requires Improvement.

While technicians are increasingly recognised for their contributions to learning and teaching, the association between their growing visibility within TEF and stronger institutional outcomes remains unexplored. In this blog, I consider why there seems to be such a strong connection between technicians and TEF performance.

Context

Higher education has evolved, and so has the workforce that enables it. Skills supply, employability and economic priorities have become increasingly prominent in higher-education policy, alongside a renewed emphasis on technical education. My doctoral research theorised a ‘technical turn’ in which contemporary technicians have moved from backstage roles concerned with maintaining and supporting equipment and facilities into more visible educational roles, teaching, and supporting learners to acquire and apply skills, and increasingly taking on duties previously deemed to be ‘academic’.  

This shift is also evident in the sector’s language, structures and policy frameworks. HESA has recently developed more differentiated Professional, Technical and Operational Staff definitions to replace the generic and widely criticised ‘non-academic’ label. The Technician Commitment has helped advance the visibility, recognition, career development and sustainability of technical roles, while the Times Higher Education’s Outstanding Technician of the Year award offers a high-profile national platform for recognising technical contribution. In addition, REF 2029 will provide more explicit opportunities to represent technical contributions to research through the Strategy, People and Research Environment framework.

Despite these advances, technicians’ contribution to learning and teaching remains comparatively under-examined. The literature remains limited, with little consensus on what excellent technical teaching looks like, who should deliver it, or how to develop and integrate it. Addressing this is primarily an institutional responsibility, although sector bodies such as the QAA and Advance HE also have an important role in ensuring that quality and professional-development frameworks recognise the many technical colleagues who already teach and support the core curriculum. That gap is likely to become more urgent as universities prioritise technical expertise and skills teaching, with policy placing both at the centre of graduate outcomes and employability agendas.

Methodology and evidence

I reviewed all 222 TEF 2023 provider statements and compared institutional ratings according to whether technicians were referenced. Of the 78 providers that referenced technicians, 33.3% achieved Overall Gold, compared with 16.7% of the 144 that did not. Conversely, just 9.0% of technician-referencing providers received Bronze or Requires Improvement, compared with 30.6% of those making no reference to technicians.

The pattern was also apparent within the two TEF aspects. For Student Experience, 37.2% of technician-referencing providers achieved Gold, compared with 20.8% of those that did not. For Student Outcomes, just 10.3% received Bronze or Requires Improvement, compared with 29.2% of those where technicians were absent.

While variations exist beneath these headlines by institution type, discipline, scale and whether the provider is a Technician Commitment signatory and supports the pedagogic development of technical staff, including through Advance HE Fellowship, the same broad pattern persists: institutions in which technicians are visible, recognised and developed are associated with stronger TEF outcomes and much less likely to receive weaker ratings.

What might explain this?

One interpretation is that technicians themselves contribute directly to better learning and teaching. That is entirely plausible, but these data cannot establish causation.

Notably, higher-performing provider statements also tended to recognise other colleagues beyond academic teams, such as educational developers, librarians, careers professionals and learning-support staff. A broader interpretation is, therefore, that technician visibility may act as a measurable indicator of a more professionally inclusive, collaborative and integrated institutional culture.

Within high-performing institutions, responsibility for teaching quality and student experience appears less likely to sit within academic roles alone, and more likely to be understood as a shared institutional responsibility.

Lessons for future TEF

As the sector looks towards the next TEF, it does so with professional and support staff as the ‘invisible majority’, representing 56% of the workforce. The direction of travel in the Office for Students’ latest consultation outcome is therefore significant. Future TEF assessments will continue to assess course delivery, academic support, resources and student engagement, increasing the importance of understanding the wider systems, resources and staff through which students experience higher education. This direction is echoed in the QAA’s new Principle 3 guidance, which explicitly places staffing alongside physical and digital resources in delivering a high-quality learning experience.

For universities, while there may be a temptation to just ‘mention the technicians’, the challenge is much broader. Future TEF guidance should encourage providers to show how the knowledge and expertise of their entire workforce contributes to excellent student experiences and outcomes, while institutions themselves need to ensure that ‘one-university’ strategies are matched by cultures in which academic, technical and professional colleagues are recognised, connected and developed, and responsibility for teaching excellence is genuinely shared across the whole university.