‘Performance’ Measures as Neoliberal Industrialisation of Higher Education: A Policy Archaeology of the Teaching Excellence Framework and Implication for the Marginalisation of Music Education

Instrumental measures pledging to assess the ‘quality’ of education represent the latest turn in the unabating neoliberalisation of the UK education sector. As the proliferation of league tables, accountancy measures and ‘common-sense’ rhetoric around ‘value for money’ become normalised, the education sector continues to transform into a site of battle; a hierarchical competition of economic Darwinism. Higher education has not been immune to this seemingly irresistible cultural hegemony, embracing its own system of valuation, validation and competition through adoption of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Conducting a Policy Archaeology (Scheurich, 1994), I seek to show that the TEF embeds a neoliberal governmentality, aimed at entrenching marketisation and industrialisation at the expense of teaching excellence. Through exploration of the policy’s inception, the TEF can be viewed as an apparatus of industrialisation and represents one within a consort of educational policies which seek to devalue music education