Half of academics view teaching-only roles as ‘career-limiting’

Most teaching-focused academics believe that there are too few opportunities to advance their careers, despite signs that these roles have become more valued within universities in recent years.

A report, Advancing the Reward of University Teaching, surveyed staff at three separate points between 2019 and 2025 about attitudes towards how university teaching is recognised and rewarded within academic careers, and the results largely improved over time.

However, the survey of more than 12,071 academics from 17 universities across nine countries found some 50 per cent agreed that roles focused on university teaching were “career-limiting” at their institution, while one in five (20 per cent) disagreed.

Of the education-focused respondents, this rose to 60 per cent, with academics with a research and teaching focus generally rating their prospects higher. 

A third of survey respondents thought university teaching was “very important” to secure promotion to full professor at their university, while two-thirds said they would like it to be “very important”.

“This pattern indicates a significant perceived gap between current practice and desired priorities,” the report says.

It found there was also a “seniority gradient” present in the results, where more senior staff were more likely to be more optimistic about the importance of teaching roles at their institution. 

“Assessments of university teaching cultures become progressively more positive with each successive rung up the career ladder, from early career academics through to university leaders,” it says.

Early career academics held the least positive views of their university’s educational environment and the commitment of its leadership to rewarding university teaching. Only 54 per cent of early career academics agreed that their university provided a supportive environment for university teaching, compared with 88 per cent of university leaders. 

Early career academics were half as likely as university leaders to believe that university leadership was committed to rewarding teaching excellence. Only 42 per cent of early-career academics identify their university leaders as “very” or “somewhat” committed to rewarding university teaching, compared with 83 per cent of leaders themselves. 

The report says that the differences in views by career stage point “to a disconnect between how policies are understood by those who set them and how they are experienced by academics as they progress through their careers”.

Ruth Graham, report author and director at R H Graham Consulting, said there was a “danger” that “education-focused contracts will be seen as a second tier or a lower value career route”. 

But overall, the results painted a positive picture of improvement at the participating universities, with the number of participants who agreed that “teaching is currently very important” rising from 25 per cent in 2019 to 31 per cent in 2025.

The report notes this showed that “cultural change is achievable within years, not decades”.

Graham added: “For the 10 institutions that have taken part in all three surveys, there has been rapid improvement and there has really been quite a considerable shift across those institutions over those six years, which is not a very long time to see that kind of change.”