The word excellence might very well be on the top of the list of overused words.

In higher education we hear of the commitment to or pursuit of research excellence, teaching excellence, excellence frameworks and so on. Such terms inevitably lead to the exchange of knowing glances, perhaps the odd eye-roll. These overused words can become strangers to us, we forget their original purpose and definition.

For example, “awesome” is rarely used to mean “inspiring fear” as it was originally intended. The etymology and history of excellence is rather nuanced but let us agree that it is intended to signify not merely good, but extraordinary. By definition, our encounters with actual excellence will be few and far between. So our daily encounters with the word are baffling. If everything is excellent, then nothing is.

If this was our problem with teaching excellence, we could press “send” at this point. However, overused as it is, excellence is a powerful lever in academia and has been put to use quite effectively in driving the intensification of research over the last two decades. Its effectiveness in the service of research is also the reason that it is counterproductive in driving teaching capacity: excellence is rare.

Rarity is desirable in research, and practically useless in teaching. Logistics matter in teaching and there is only so much you can do with a handful of excellent teachers.

Why excellence works for research

Before explaining the practicalities of teaching, and suggesting that a lot of good teachers trump a few excellent ones, we will outline why excellence is effective for research culture.

It is widely reported that research careers are based on peer recognition and other markers of prestige. Few would argue that career development is individualistic and competitive – there are only so many highly ranked journals, or prestigious grants. Researchers collaborate but careers are considered through individual standing. While promotion boards are not themselves competitive, the achievements necessary to succeed are.

Naturally, there are winners and losers in any competition. But in the research environment, this hardly matters. The rivalry drives focus and intensity and, in theory, the quality of the research. While the metrics of research excellence can be disputed, and evolve, there is no doubt that the mechanism of excellence very clearly does intensify research effort, perpetually. For universities with just a few excellent researchers in specific fields, it does not matter that other researchers have not (yet) reached excellence. The presence of non-excellent researchers is not harmful to the reputation of the university, as long as some excellent ones can represent the institution.

Teaching, however, is very different. If we take an analogous situation in the teaching environment, a school may have a few “star teachers”, but most of the faculty are perhaps satisfactory. As students will encounter the star teachers very occasionally over the course of the degree, their experience is unlikely to be changed by these sporadic encounters.

Human nature being what it is, our students will be more impacted by any bad experiences they have than good ones. Our argument is that promoting only excellence sidelines the significant work needed to create large cohorts of good educators, that is consistently competent and professional teachers. Therefore, what counts in teaching is a consistently good student experience, not an occasionally excellent one.

Setting a threshold

We argue that adopting a core principle of the human rights approach, the minimum core obligation, may be valuable here.

Unlike equality frameworks which permit people to be treated equally badly, the minimum core imagines a threshold. Should someone’s experience of education for example fall beneath the threshold, then their right is not fulfilled or respected. Applying this to higher education, we can give colleagues intent on excellent research careers a more realistic goal for their teaching: not excellence, but safely hitting a standard. In turn, this may shift the emphasis of what education-focused colleagues deliver. From being excellent teachers in their own classrooms (again, some may be, but their exception is not the rule), to influencing colleagues to deliver a strong standard across all our students’ classrooms.

Such a project inspired by human rights thresholds, will, no doubt, find immediate resistance. It goes against the current zeitgeist of excellence, defined by peer recognition and international influence. These are indicators of a strong research culture which blinds us to the differences between research and educational leadership. Educators have impact in the more immediate confines of the campus, it is immediate and palpable. These forms of impact must be captured and investigated, not ignored, if we are to understand the influence of good and challenge bad teaching.

Borrowing from human rights

In multiple ways we seek refuge in the human rights framework as a vehicle for transgressive education, and to counter the dominance of neoliberal management of teaching and learning. It has been well used as an implementation tool by the University of Glasgow’s Ethics Committee, one of the first globally that creates a space for the ethical evaluation of scholarship. Here the Scottish Human Rights Commission’s PANEL principles have been applied to consider the value of cyclical enhancements and partnership working.

The N, E and P (non-discrimination, empowerment and participation) speak to the involvement of rights holders (students and educators) and the A and L (accountability and legal frameworks) help us close feedback loops by ensuring duty bearers (educators and institutional leaders) are accountable for, and have access to and develop policies that usefully progress enhanced practice.

Once a threshold of good enough is set by an institution, an annual process of reflection and reflexive action – via examination boards, periodic subject reviews, and so on – that draws meaningfully on student experience, and a culture of continuing professional development amongst colleagues, allow incremental progression and raising standards. This is by always centering the human – student and educator – rather than the regulation.

In turn, this cyclical focus on continued enhancement gradually draws in colleagues perhaps reluctant to engage where “excellence” was the only standard. Excellence, we hold, is a distraction.

In turn, disappearing the impact that high quality teaching has, in order to appear the appropriation of impact as narrowly defined research metrics, has alienated us from an everyday understanding of the word: learning.

Equally, the distortion of scholarship has resulted in narrowing what was once described as a very broad and creative calling, according to the work of a certain Ernest Boyer. Reclamation of these concepts, reframing impact and aligning value with learner outcomes all have a role to play in the rehabilitation of teaching in HE, if we mean for a significant change to occur.