Chapter 5: Higher Education Professional Services Staff as Regulatory Policy Actors: an English Case Study

Case study research undertaken in Spring 2019 uncovered that only a small percentage of a university workforce were able to engage with a large, influential teaching regulation. This “exclusivity” impacted on the relationships in the academic schools studied and by extension, the capacity that the regulation had to enhance teaching. Key findings included the regulatory agenda elevating the status of some workers while increasing the precariousness of others, an inability to agree on a local definition of excellence and general confusion, ambivalence and disdain surrounding structural and cultural changes.

This chapter uses the example of the English Teaching Excellence Framework, a relatively new centrally imposed quality framework, to explore “frontline” professional services staff as policy actors. This chapter will use the study’s findings to explore the complex identities, tensions, and workplace dynamics of staff working to implement regulation locally and provide a reflection of the case study methodology used to expose these findings. In its exploration of the complex reality of policy enactment, I hope to encourage institutions to consider local engagement with regulation by repositioning them within institutional discourse as opportunities rather than threats. This study should speak to those that are navigating HE governance and management to meet commanding central regulation.