UK Higher Education at a Crossroads: Reflections on Issues and Practice in Teaching and Learning

SUMMARY

Further to the release of the UK report, Higher Education in the Learning Society(Dealing et al.,1997), this paper examines some of the main institutional challenges impacting on the relevance and quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Selected concerns include underfunding of higher education, mass education and quality, the demand for enhancing student employability or key skills, and the relative status of teaching within research intensive environments. In the light of these external pressures, which seem to be shared by many universities in the English‐speaking world, specific recommendations are made, largely from the field of organizational development, with a view to moving the rhetoric of ‘vision’ into the reality of people involvement, specific action and consequence.