Tuition fees are being raised! — TEF The Basics

It seems more and more likely that tuition fees are going to be increased. I wish I could say that this wasn’t true, but unfortunately that is not the case. The Conservative government intends to lift the fee cap from £9000, by allowing Higher Education (HE) institutions to raise their tuition fees with inflation.

How exactly are they doing this?

So you may have heard about something called the TEF, which stands for the Teaching Excellence Framework. This is the tool the government are using to bring in higher tuition fees.

The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) is the government’s proposed way to measure the quality of teaching provided by a HE institution. If a university is seen to be providing good quality teaching by the TEF, they will then be allowed to raise their tuition fees with inflation.

To put it simply:

The Teaching Excellence Framework provides the opportunity for universities to raise their tuition fees if they reach “targets” of good quality teaching.

So what would that look like?

There are various stages involved in the implementation of the TEF. The first stage will be happening this academic year. Universities that pass their Quality Assurance Agency Review, which happens each year, will be seen as meeting the expectations of the TEF. At this stage, fee increases are not involved.

The next stage occurs in the 2017/18 academic year. This is when universities will be able to raise their fees in line with inflation. Currently, this would be about £250 more than the current price. This would raise tuition fees to £9250 a year.

Whilst this initially seems like a fairly insignificant amount, these fee increases are accumulative, meaning that by 2020, students are likely to pay around £10,000 a year to attend university.

As a Students’ Union we are committed to oppose the TEF as it puts the future of Higher Education and the financial security of hundreds of thousands of students into question.

I’m going to use this blog to update on the future implementation of the TEF as well as providing further insight into what the TEF is and how it affects you. I’ll keep you updated with what we’re doing to campaign against it as well as ways in which you can get involved.

If you have any questions, please get in contact by emailing me at ali.day@sheffield.ac.uk

Ali :)