Accredit account

Gus Pennington, chair of the ILT's accreditation committee, should read his own consultative documents. Accredited members under the ILT proposals will have to provide hundreds of pieces of paper ("file of evidence ... work samples'), even though many of the "outcomes" are undocumentable (for example, most in group D) and will be expected to go on training courses ("CPD guidelines ... courses/workshops ... external activities"). All this will eat into time for teaching, not research. The overall ILT requirements will typically cost an academic about two working weeks' time a year, that is a minimum 7 per cent cut in teaching time. I would want a very large file of evidence indeed to convince me that the outcome of this would be a net improvement in teaching quality.

Tim Reuter

Department of history University of Southampton