Standards describe good teaching. Peer review builds it
Samantha Clarke, Jessica Frawley, Eszter Kalman, The University of Sydney; Nicholas Grindle, University College London
A question still waiting for an answer
In April 2024, Emeritus Professor Denise Chalmers asked in this blog whether teaching and learning quality had ended up “on the cutting room floor” of the Universities Accord or whether it even made it to the cutting room at all. Of the 47 recommendations within the Accord, only one directly addressed quality learning and teaching. Assuring and improving teaching quality is complex work that sits at the intersection of multiple domains, standards, and stakeholders. It is variously advanced through national, professional, institutional, and individual mechanisms. No single body holds responsibility for teaching quality; it is shared across regulators, accreditors, institutions, and academics, and any conversation about how to strengthen it has to begin from that recognition.
Two years on from the Accord’s final report, the formalisation of these discussions at the national level can be seen in the recent establishment of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) and its Interim Statement of Strategic Priorities, which names ‘Quality Teaching’ as a strategic priority. The Minister’s Letter of Expectations further asks the Commission to “continue the work on professionalisation of teaching in higher education through the progression of advice developed by the Enhancing Professional Practice in Higher Education Working Group”.
The core issue now is not whether teaching quality is on the agenda – it has always been, across many parts of the sector – but how that shared responsibility is exercised, and what role ATEC plays within it. Emeritus Professor Liz Johnson’s recent national conversation with the TEFA Network placed Peer Review of Teaching (PRT) among the recognised forms of expert review in professional learning, and asks a question: what needs to be mandated across the sector, and what is best decided locally? The answer to this question shapes how universities and the sector address the Accord’s call for “increased, systematised use of peer review of teaching” (Recommendation 14).
Standards describe; peer review develops
Recommendation 31 of the Accord proposed professional teaching standards “modelled on the framework administered by AdvanceHE in the United Kingdom” to sit alongside the existing Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards) 2021, which provides the regulatory floor that ATEC will operate within as the Australian system’s “independent steward”.
Well-designed standards and frameworks can be useful in making educational goals explicit and visible. They can describe what good educational practice looks like for individuals, institutions, and regulators. But standards do not, on their own, build good teaching. While a shared language through which we can talk about teaching quality is a starting point, the sector needs resources and approaches that operationalise aspirations and turn this into practice. Universities have a range of approaches and strategic levers through which to build good teaching, from resourcing to staff development and reward. For individual educators, we know that what builds good teaching is teachers talking with other teachers about teaching.
PRT is one powerful structure through which educators can take designated time to hold and scaffold that conversation. PRT, when well designed, has long been associated with improvements in teaching practice, reflective capacity, and the development of teaching communities (Bell, 2001; Cutroni & Paladino, 2023; Sachs & Parsell, 2014). Recent Australian work by Harper et al. (2026) demonstrates that anchoring PRT in pedagogy – specifically, in a research-based pedagogical framework – can directly mitigate the substantive, structural, and relational challenges (such as surveillance, anxiety, and superficial feedback) that have historically plagued PRT programs.
Johnston, Baik and Chester’s (2022) systematic review of PRT in Australian higher education confirms what international evidence has also found: there is no one-size-fits-all model. PRT outcomes are shaped by institutional context – by mission, scale, discipline mix, governance structures, and the maturity of other teaching enhancement infrastructure. We have written more fully about how to design PRT programs ecologically in a recent chapter. The short version: design for your context. As we engage more with standards that sit in the national context, it is worth exploring how peer review looks in different contexts and how institutions navigate the balance between addressing external standards and meeting the needs of internal conditions. Our chapter showcases two examples that use peer review as a pathway for developing staff in relation to broader standards.
Two programs, two contexts
Improvements to teaching and learning often emerge from the ground-up, adapting to teaching standards and frameworks over their lifecycle. This is evident at the University of Sydney in the way that Peer Review and Observation of Teaching programs have emerged from Faculty and School instances initially, through to a consolidated and centralised program from 2021 onwards. Peer review is now aligned to the international AdvanceHE’s Professional Standards Framework (PSF) (2011, 2023) and to Sydney’s own institutional teaching principles. This progression illustrates how the work of improving teaching and learning can adapt to the broader landscape of standards and frameworks. The PRT program is deliberately integrated with continuing professional development and fellowship recognition, and is further recognised in Sydney’s new Academic Excellence Framework as evidence of quality teaching for promotion. Peer review is not a standalone activity but part of an ecosystem of teaching enhancement, though one that depends on the resourcing to train and coordinate a reviewer pool.
Sydney’s PRT program is one design choice among many. Over the past two years, we have been comparing it with another: University College London’s (UCL) institution-wide peer review program is older and departmentally administered, and is organised around a ‘Peer Dialogue‘ model in which all staff with significant teaching responsibilities act as both reviewer and reviewee. As is the case with most UK universities, UCL’s program pre-dates the PSF and owes more to the Quality Assurance Agency’s audit regime dating from the early years of the century. For the past two decades (and again in common with most UK universities), UCL’s driver for change has been the need to adapt the peer review process to cope with rocketing student numbers and pressures on staff time. Collaborative peer review programs draw their strength from broad participation –everyone takes part, as both reviewer and reviewee – but this also makes them especially sensitive to changes in the local context that might disincentivise participation.
Neither program’s structure is the right answer in the abstract. Each is a coherent response to a particular institutional context. Our ongoing collaboration across the two institutions has surfaced exactly this, informing public commentary, peer-reviewed work, and continued shared learning. Some of the design choices that each of us treated as obvious – such as whether reviewers must be centrally trained, or whether the model can rely on collaborative reciprocity – turned out to be products of our own institutional microcultures rather than universal features of good practice. Cross-institutional dialogue between educational leaders is itself a form of evidence-building – and one of the few ways to make those tacit design choices visible.
The same lesson is also evident closer to home: colleagues at the University of Newcastle have shown how a reciprocal, non-hierarchical pairing model, anchored in a shared pedagogical framework, meets the same challenges in yet another way. The point is not which design is right, but that each is a considered response to its own conditions.
What the sector should hold onto, resist, and invest in
As ATEC and the sector work through what teaching quality means and how to support it, we suggest PRT should be one part of the plan – if the support is the right shape, and the responsibility is properly distributed. It builds on substantial prior work, but also comes with pitfalls worth naming. Three things in particular are worth holding onto, resisting, and investing in.
The sector should hold onto the Accord’s position that PRT has a role in Australia’s teaching quality infrastructure. Recommendation 14 was a quiet but important commitment, and it should be carried forward by ATEC in its stewardship work, and by universities, professional bodies, and academic networks in their responses also.
The sector should resist the temptation to prescribe PRT program design at the system level. The distinction worth making is between national frameworks – which describe what good teaching looks like, as Sydney does with AdvanceHE’s PSF – and national templates, which would prescribe how PRT must be done in every institution. The first is reference architecture; the second is operational design. The first can be national; the second has to be local, because PRT outcomes are shaped by mission, scale, discipline mix, and the maturity of other teaching enhancement infrastructure. Liz Johnson’s question – what needs to be mandated across the sector, and what is best decided locally?– applies here directly.
And the sector should invest in the organisational infrastructure inside universities that carries out PRT: the teaching and learning centres, academic developers, and education-focused academics who design, coordinate, and sustain these programs, and who are too often the first casualties when budgets tighten.
Beyond the individual institution, the sector should also invest in the structures that allow universities and their educators to build evidence across institutions about what works in which contexts. The proposed Learning and Teaching Council (Accord Recommendation 30 h. iii.) is one such structure, if it draws on the substantial existing Australian work on teaching quality that Chalmers rightly insisted should not be ignored. Cross-institutional networks of educators and educational leaders are another. The Teaching and Education Focused Academic (TEFA) Network is one such network, and its recent briefing paper to the Commonwealth Department of Education makes a closely related case that calls for principle-based approaches to teaching quality that preserve institutional autonomy and active involvement of teaching-focused academics in sector-led reform implementation.
Networks like these are inexpensive, generative, and exactly the kind of evidence base ATEC’s stewardship role calls for. With teaching quality named in ATEC’s strategic priorities and in the Minister’s Letter of Expectations, the work ahead is for us to collectively shape what that looks like on the ground. This is a responsibility that is shared across regulators, institutions, professional bodies, educators, university leaders, and networks like the TEFA.
What’s needed now
Teaching and learning quality has long sat across the work of multiple bodies – TEQSA, professional accreditors, institutional quality processes, and academics themselves who work closely with their boundary-crossing third space professional colleagues. ATEC’s establishment, its strategic priorities, and the Minister’s Letter of Expectations now add another important voice to that conversation. Many in the sector are already heavily involved and invested in building teaching quality, with institutions across the country engaging with a breadth of standards and frameworks within their unique institutional contexts.
PRT is one of the rare institutional structures that can bridge standards of teaching quality through the development of individual educators and the communities that sustain them. It is already running in many Australian universities, generating evidence, and building relational networks across the sector.
The Accord’s vision will be best realised by recognising and protecting the institution-level practices that are already working well.
Standards describe good teaching. Peer review builds it.
Dr Samantha Clarke, Dr Jessica Frawley, and Dr Eszter Kalman are Associate Professors in the DVC Education and Students Portfolio at the University of Sydney.
Dr Nick Grindle is an Associate Professor at the Higher Education Development and Support Institute (HEDS), University College London.