National Teaching Fellowship Scheme
About the scheme
Applications for the 2024 and 2025 round of National Teaching Fellowships (NTF) are now closed and institutional nominees have been chosen.
If you are interested in applying in 2025 and 2026, please visit the Advance HE Teaching Excellence Awards website for more information and email Dr Chris Little.
The NTF awards were introduced by AdvanceHE in 2000. NTF is a highly competitive scheme and a prestigious award recognised nationally and internationally. Up to 55 higher education practitioners receive this award annually for their excellent contributions to learning and teaching in higher education from across the UK. Today, there are over 900 national teaching fellows.
Beyond the recognition, the fellowship offers unique opportunities to collaborate with like-minded individuals in a growing community of passionate learning and teaching practitioners from a wide range of disciplines and professional areas. New NTFs join the Association for National Teaching Fellows.
This page offers guidance on:
- AdvanceHE Webinar Briefings
- NTF Criteria
- LEED Teaching Excellence Development Award
- Internal Selection Procedure
- National Teaching Fellows at Manchester Met
NTF Criteria
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NTF Criteria
All nominee claims will be assessed on the evidence provided to each of the three NTFS award criteria.
NTFS Criterion 1: Individual Excellence
Evidence of enhancing and transforming student outcomes and the teaching profession; demonstrating impact commensurate with the individual’s context and the opportunities afforded by it.
NTFS Criterion 2: Raising the Profile Of Excellence
Evidence of supporting colleagues and influencing support for student learning and the teaching profession; demonstrating impact and engagement beyond the nominee’s immediate academic or professional role.
NTFS Criterion 3: Developing Excellence
Show the nominee’s commitment to and impact of ongoing professional development concerning teaching and learning and learning support. Reviewers will be looking for evidence of reach, value and impact to be demonstrated within the narrative presented in Section B. Please note that each of the three award criteria above is given equal consideration in the assessment process and weighted equally in the overall score.
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Reach, Value and Impact
Reviewers will be looking for evidence that demonstrates the reach, value and impact of the nominee’s practice. Nominees should be mindful of this requirement and aim to provide evidence that demonstrates a balance of these three qualities across the claim.
Reach
The scale of influence.
Though ‘geographic’ reach may be important for some nominees, it is useful to consider other ways that a nominee can demonstrate reach. Some nominees may demonstrate reach at a department/ faculty/ institution/ national/ global level, for example, but others might provide evidence of how their practice has reached different groups of students, individuals and/or organisations (e.g. postgraduates, commuter students, BAME students, online learners, etc.).s
Value
The benefit derived for students and staff (which may take different forms).
Value may include qualitative evidence such as a change in approach to learning among students or staff. For example, evidence may be provided about how the work being described has added value to the student learning experience or teaching practice. Value may also relate to the quality of enhanced experiences and the meaningfulness of practices. Some nominees may also be working in settings where there are positive explicit ethical elements to their practice.
Impact
The difference that has been made to policy, practice and/or student outcomes as the result of an activity.
The focus here is on explicit evidence of positive change taking place. Impact evidence can be both quantitative and qualitative, but it is important to show how the activities described have changed teaching practice and/or learning outcomes.
LEED Teaching Excellence Development Fund
The LEED Teaching Excellence Development Fund was established in 2022/23.
The 3 NTF candidates who are selected by the internal panel and officially nominated by the institution to go forward for AdvanceHE consideration will be awarded £500 each on merit from the fund to further develop their teaching excellence, to better support their upcoming NTF application. The fund could be used, for example, to fund conference attendance or academic CPD.
If an NTF is awarded, successful NTFs will receive an additional £1500 for professional development after Advance HE has announced the results in Summer and the winners will be invited to showcase their work at LEED events such as our annual Teaching and Learning Conference.
Internal selection procedure
Applications for the 2024/25 round of National Teaching Fellowship are now open.
If you are interested in applying in 2024/25, please email Dr Chris Little.
Colleagues putting together a draft claim should have this document finished and uploaded to our portal by 12 midday on Thursday 10 October 2024. Applications received after this time and date will not be considered.
Colleagues should construct their draft claim using the form below, adhering strictly to the formatting and word count requirements stated within the accompanying guidance document. Documents that exceed the stated word counts by more than 10% per criterion will not be put forward to the internal selection panel.
The Teaching Excellence Award Leads (TEALs) Dr Chris Little and Dr Gladson Chikwa can offer to review 1 draft or meet to discuss your ideas ahead of the internal deadline.
Once received, draft claims will be anonymised and sent to our internal selection panel for anonymous review and scoring using the AdvanceHE National Teaching Fellowship Schemes (NTFS) scoring guidance and systems.
Claims will then be reviewed, and all claimants will be informed of the outcome and receive feedback on their drafts week commencing 28 October 2024.
AdvanceHE only allow a maximum of 3 institutional nominees per institution for NTF. The chosen institutional nominees will then be supported by colleagues in UTA to prepare their claim for submission in March 2025.
Those colleagues not selected to be institutional nominees will receive developmental feedback and a tailored support offer to help them work towards other recognitions of their teaching excellence.
Please direct any queries to Dr Chris Little: [email protected], Teaching Excellence Award Lead.
Stories From Existing National Teaching Fellows
NTF & CATE Exemplars
This short resource highlights some exemplary NTF and CATE winners, with videos that offer a wealth of experience on the positives of working towards NTF and what pitfalls to avoid when writing your application.National Teaching Fellows at Manchester Met
Click through the below tabs to see examples of past winners at Manchester Metropolitan University. You can find a more extensive directory of National Teaching Fellows on the Advance HE website.
All of the Manchester Met Fellows below are happy to mentor aspiring NTFs and offer support with applications.
Awardee
Dr Stephen Lynch
Date of award
2022
Current role
Reader in Education, Pedagogy and Citizenship
Focus of NTF application
- Programming in the Maths curriculum.
- Widening Participation (WP).
- Research feeding into teaching.
Contact
Email: s[email protected]
Twitter: @DrStephenLynch
Awardee
Dr Theresa Nicholson
Date of award
2020
Current role
Reader (Education and Pedagogy), Department Education Lead
Focus of NTF application
- Design and delivery of inclusive curricula.
- Student engagement and belonging.
- Innovation and technology-enhanced learning.
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @ThezzaNicholson
Awardee
Dr Chrissi Nerantzi
Date of Award
2015
Current role
Reader in Academic CPD
Focus of NTF application
- Creativity.
- Open education.
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @chrissinerantzi
Awardee
Professor Kevin Singh
Date of award
2015
Current role
Head of Manchester School of Architecture
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Awardee
Professor Kirsten Jack
Date of award
2014
Current role
Reader (Learning & Teaching)
Focus of NTF application
A focus of my application was the use of innovative pedagogy to support health professionals to explore and manage their emotions. In the claim, I reflected on how I had used the arts, for example, poetry, to support emotional self-awareness development.
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @Heijinxs
Awardee
Professor Mark Langan
Date of award
2013
Current role
Professor of Higher Education
Focus of NTF application
- HE metrics/student surveys.
- Learner autonomy.
- Peer and self-assessment.
- Fieldwork.
- Educational journal editorship.
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @AMarkLangan
Awardee
Darren Raven
Date of award
2013
Current role
Senior Lecturer & Education Lead for the Department of Design.
Focus of NTF application
- Creative curriculum development.
- Design education as a liminal space.
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Awardee
Professor Claire Hamshire
Date of award
2012
Current role
Faculty Head of International
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @clairehamshire
Awardee
Prof. (Emerita) Jo Verran
Date of award
2011
Current role
Emeritus Professor
Focus of NTF application
The prime focus of my NTF application was the exploration of the use of the arts and humanities for teaching microbiology, and to enhance students’ science communication skills – as well as my own.
Contact
Twitter: @JoVerran
Awardee
Professor Tim Cable
Date of award
2007
Current role
Director of the Institute of Sport
Contact
Email: [email protected]
Previous institutional nominees
2023
- Professor Mark Peace.
- Dr Kai Syng Tan.
- Dr Iwi Ugiagbe-Green.
2024
- Professor Mark Peace.
- Dr Iwi Ugiagbe-Green.
- Dr Carmen Hererro.
Contact us
Contact us
If you have any further questions about applying for the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme at Manchester Metropolitan, please feel free to contact the Teaching Excellence Award Lead Dr Chris Little using the email address below.