Professional standards in the context of mathematics teaching in HE

Particularly with increased student fees coming in, the formal recognition of teaching is now high on the HE agenda. It is therefore timely that the Higher Education Academy has recently revised its UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education, (henceforth UKPSF), which sets out the standards that HE teaching should meet. Full details can be found on the HEA website, www.heacademy.ac.uk/ukpsf. Here we outline what it means for the training of a new MSOR (Maths, Stats and OR) lecturer. The UKPSF is a generic description of the main dimensions of the roles of teaching and supporting learning within HE, written from the perspective of the practitioner. It outlines a national framework for recognizing and benchmarking learning and teaching support roles within HE. It has two components: the dimensions of practice, outlining the activities, knowledge and professional values our job entails; and the descriptors of what characterises a given level of professional role. These components are given below.