The zealots and fetishists have had their say...

now it's academics' turn to pipe up and debate the professional standards framework for teaching, says Liz Allen

It was the most low-key launch to what had been billed as an essential initiative. The "first-ever national professional standards framework for standards in teaching and supporting learning in higher education" was supposed to raise the game for the whole sector. It was supposed to signal the need to get serious about professional development.

But apart from a report in The Times Higher , the announcement on February 23 may have passed you by. Despite support from the Higher Education Academy, Universities UK, the Standing Conference of Principals and the funding councils, details can be found on the HEA's website only if you know what you're looking for. My guess is that the overwhelming majority of those who do the teaching haven't a clue that the standards exist.

At first glance the standards seem inoffensive, even bland. They employ the kind of edu-speak that bends the knee in required directions - referring, for instance, to teaching and learning "to support the student experience".

(I have yet to hear academics, even those in their wilder excesses of fury at managerialism and bureaucracy, advocate teaching that detracts from the student experience - perhaps this could be a new form of industrial action?) In fact, the standards represent an attempt to wrest consensus from a series of opposing and unengaged positions - from the dreams of institutional managers fetishising the research assessment exercise and those who think that effective teaching descends pentacostally on the award of a PhD, to the bean-counters who wish to deconstruct higher education teaching into a list of tickable competences.J Having delivered what was a government initiative, the HEA is adamant that these are not its standards: they belong to "the sector".JThe intention is that each institution will apply them to its own professional development programme. This will supposedly produce consistency and quality for students, support staff development and foster creativity and innovation. A consultation exercise was conducted without generating debate about the usefulness and purpose of a standards framework. To me, the consultation felt like a box-ticking exercise in its own right, designed to upset the fewest people rather than to develop a meaningful position and create consensus around it. It was always destined to end up in the in-tray of educational developers without touching even the edges of the academic community.

It is hard to see how the initiative can work without a real debate with those who teach, research and work directly with students. Indeed, within lecturers' union Natfhe, there has been an impassioned debate about teaching and professional development.

There are those who find the notion of courses to "teach academics to teach" a patronising anathema. There are those who are outraged that part-timers are in effect excluded from such provision by not being paid to attend it. There are those who would rather develop their own teaching practice without reference to institutional policies and "reward systems"

and those who want to share new practice with colleagues and to gain recognition for this area of their work. Some academics feel that only peers within their own subject area could have anything to contribute to discussions about teaching and course content, while others want to widen the debate to look at forms of support for diverse groups of students, drawing from practice elsewhere.

But in all these discussions, common themes emerge: teaching and research should be at the centre of university life, not administration, quality assurance and facilities management. Academic freedom is as important in the context of teaching as in that of research.

Academics want to make the links between research, scholarship and teaching real - and they need the time and the opportunity to do this. Student diversity should make learning and teaching more exciting, and we need the resources and appropriate class sizes to achieve this goal. Information and communication technology should serve pedagogy, not drive it.

Accountability should be as light touch as possible so that while students know what they can expect from their course, there is still freedom for teachers to experiment, innovate, deviate and allow the unexpected - even if it doesn't quite fit in with the course plan. And, above all, professional development should be a peer-owned and defined process that creates synergy between the different aspects of the academic role, rather than a managerially imposed set of mechanistic activities.

The Natfhe website is hosting an open forum on professional development. We challenge institutions to do the same - to ask their staff what they want and what support they need to achieve it. Professional standards can't mean anything without the full involvement of the profession. No one can sign up to them until they know what they are. If the HEA is right, then the standards must genuinely belong to us, all those who teach and learn in higher education.

Liz Allen is national official of the universities department of lecturers'

union Natfhe ( www.natfhe.org.uk ).