One in five professors in the UK have been promoted to their current position for their teaching achievements, according to a new survey that suggests efforts to raise the status of classroom activities are paying off.
While most professors are still promoted based on their research, a poll by the National Council of University Professors (NCUP) found academics were frequently joining the UK professoriate on account of their teaching, with 18.4 per cent of 1,018 respondents saying they were promoted on a teaching route.
While the survey offers only a snapshot of how Britain’s 23,000 professors achieved their positions, the prevalence of teaching-led promotions was striking and indicated a significant shift in reward and recognition practices, explained NCUP’s president Roger Watson, who, until autumn last year, was professor of nursing at the University of Hull.
“I cannot recall anyone being promoted by this route when I set out as an academic in 1998 at the University of Edinburgh and probably only encountered it about a decade ago,” said Professor Watson, who is academic dean of Southwest Medical University’s School of Nursing in Luzhou, China.
Welcoming the shift, Professor Watson said that teaching-led promotions to professor had gone from being “non-existent” to becoming an “established route [that] is now more common”, he said.
That view is echoed by the NCUP’s study, The Role of the UK Professoriate, which notes that a similar study in 1991 did not even mention the possibility of promotion to professor via teaching, while a 2015 study by the Royal Academy of Engineering urged the higher education community to “urgently…develop teaching-based promotion measures” that could lead to professorships.
The NCUP study describes the rise of teaching-led promotions to professor as a “positive development” but adds that these “routes to professorship other than via the traditional research route should be more widely publicised and made available”.
The rise of teaching-driven professors follows efforts led by the Higher Education Academy, now Advance HE, to clarify promotion policies for teaching-focused staff in the form of the Professional Standards Framework, as well as the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework in 2017.
The growing number of teaching-focused professors was likely to reflect the rise of certain subjects where teaching-related promotions were more accepted, said Professor Watson. “In my own subject of nursing, I imagine it is more common because many have an educational, not a research background, while it is not as easy to land large research grants for research in nursing as it perhaps is in medicine or other disciplines,” said Professor Watson.
The NCUP’s survey also asked about the roles undertaken by professors and found that women – who made up 37 per cent of respondents – and non-white British professors were more likely to take on many departmental roles than male professors, who, in turn, were more likely to describe themselves as a mentor. “Faced with the under-representation of both groups, there is a need to increase their involvement in mentorship to act as role models,” the study notes.
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