Blackburn College Awarded for its High-Quality Student Experience

University Centre at Blackburn College (UCBC) has been awarded Silver for student experience in the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) 2023.

This silver ranking means that the student experience for undergraduate courses at UCBC is typically very high quality.  

The TEF is a national scheme run by the Office for Students (OfS) that aims to encourage higher education providers to improve and deliver excellence in the areas that students care about the most: teaching, learning and achieving positive outcomes from their studies.

The TEF does this by assessing and rating universities and colleges for excellence above a set of minimum requirements for quality and standards.

Providers that take part in the TEF receive an overall rating as well as two underpinning ratings – one for the student experience and one for student outcomes. Although eligible to apply, not all institutions will receive a rating if not deemed to offer a high-quality offering to students.

Overall, UCBC was rated Bronze, which means that student experience and student outcomes together are typically high quality, and there are some very high-quality features.

This latest praise for UCBC comes after it recently beat regional and national ratings in the National Student Survey (NSS), which questions Higher Education (HE) students in the UK about a range of factors related to their academic experience, including the teaching on their course, assessment, and feedback.

The TEF panel judged that UCBC embedded very high-quality teaching, feedback and assessment practices that are effective in supporting students’ learning, progression, and attainment. This is backed up with the College’s exceptional NSS results in which 95% of students said that their teaching staff explained things well.

The TEF also cited how the College uses innovation, employer engagement and professional practice to ensure industry informed provision, contributing to a very high-quality academic experience for its students.

In addition, judges said that UCBC effectively engages with its students, leading to improvements to the experiences and outcomes of its students. This again was ratified by the NSS results showing that 92% of students felt supported by their teaching staff, and 86% said their opinions about the course were valued by staff – which is 10% higher than local average, and way above the national score of 74.4%.  

Commenting on the rating, Dr Fazal Dad, Principal and Chief Executive of Blackburn College said:

“We’re proud to offer over 1,000 undergraduate students a very high-quality university experience at UCBC, and we’re pleased that this has been recognised by the TEF.

“We constantly seek to engage with our students and that helps us to keep improving and providing a standout offering that supports them in both their learning and life after UCBC.”