Assessment and feedback is the foundation of student life at university, but in an age of rapidly advancing digital tools and changing learning behaviours, the landscape has never been more challenging. That’s where Reader in Higher Education, Dr Edd Pitt, is making a difference. As a champion of evidence-based teaching and learning practices, he’s worked internationally to help higher education institutions stay ahead of the curve. Now, off the back of being awarded a prestigious 2025 National Teaching Fellowship by Advance HE, he’s sharing the impact he’s making closer to home.
Congratulations on your award! Can you tell us more about it?
The National Teaching Fellowship (NTF) Scheme, is one of the most high-profile and sought after awards in UK higher education. This year only 55 academics who demonstrate excellence in teaching, innovation, and leadership were awarded NTF. My award specifically recognised my sustained contributions to professional learning development, assessment enhancement, and feedback innovation in the UK and beyond over the past two decades. I am deeply honoured to receive this recognition and proud to have enabled thousands of staff and students across the world to think differently about assessment and feedback practice, which is itself a powerful driver of learning.
Looking back to when you were an undergraduate, was an academic career always something you aspired to?
Not at all….I don’t think I even knew what an academic career really was when I was an undergraduate. I was a first generation HE student in the late 1990’s and neither of my parents finished school and so I was focused on not letting my parents down, getting through my degree, figuring out what I was good at, and then what kind of difference I might want to make in the world. What I did know though was that I was deeply interested in how people learn and how education shapes opportunity. I was always drawn to exploring ideas, asking questions, and helping others make sense of complex things, but I didn’t yet see that as a career path.
It was only during my postgraduate studies where I was lucky enough to also do some teaching that I realised how powerful education could be, not just for individual students, but for wider society. I was also lucky enough to meet my academic mentor Professor Lin Norton who helped me realise that helping, nurturing and inspiring others educationally excited me to the point where I should embark on a PhD in assessment and feedback and make a real difference. Lin suddenly sadly died earlier this year, and I feel honoured to have worked with her and to have been inspired by her and maybe in some sort of way me gaining this personal recognition is a fitting recognition of the impact she had on me as an academic.
If you were an undergraduate again, how would you like to be assessed?
If I were an undergraduate again, I’d want to be assessed in ways that felt meaningful, transparent, and fair. I think I’d have benefitted from assessments that clearly connected to real-world applications, tasks that showed me why what I was learning mattered beyond the classroom, and flexible assessment formats that enabled me to play to my strengths and weaknesses and demonstrate my knowledge outside of the traditional exams and essays.
I would also value assessment processes that supported my growth, not just judged my performance. Timely, dialogic feedback, where I could talk through what I’d done well and where I could improve, would have made a huge difference to how confident I felt in my learning. And most importantly, I’d want to know that my work was being assessed fairly, with clear criteria and space for my individuality as a learner to come through. Back in the 1990’s feedback was often rather sparse, and I certainly don’t remember discussing assessment criteria or exemplars at all.
In many ways, my entire academic career has been about trying to create those kinds of assessment and feedback experiences for others, the ones I wish I’d had.
How have you been able to do that at Kent?
My work at Kent has centred on transforming assessment and feedback practices to be more purposeful, coherent, and aligned with what we know supports student learning. A key part of this has been leading the development of a new, principles-based Assessment and Feedback Policy for the University which foregrounds transparency, student agency, and feedback that promotes meaningful engagement and learning.
My contribution to Advance HE’s Assessment and Feedback Literature Review (2023) directly shaped their national Assessment and Feedback Framework, which in turn has influenced institutional guidance at Kent. In practice, I’ve been supporting colleagues to redesign assessment strategies across programmes, introducing approaches that promote feedback literacy, reduce over-assessment, and align better with learning outcomes. The practical resources I’ve developed, including assessment design tools, learning process rubrics, and AI-integrated feedback prompts, are helping help staff implement change in ways that are both scalable and sustainable to improve the student experience.
Earlier this year you were awarded Principal Fellowship of the HEA, also by Advance HE. How do the two Fellowships differ – and what do you gain from them?
The Principal Fellowship (PFHEA) and the National Teaching Fellowship (NTF) are both prestigious recognitions awarded by Advance HE, but they serve quite distinct purposes and reflect different dimensions of impact. In essence, NTF evidences the influence of your teaching and practice, while PFHEA evidences your strategic leadership and capacity to shape systems, culture, and structures.
Gaining both awards has been incredibly affirming but in different ways. The NTF process -which was highly competitive- recognised my passion for educational enhancement and improvement of staff and student outcomes more widely. The PFHEA, on the other hand, enabled me to reflect on my leadership journey and clarified the principles that underpin my strategic approach to areas such as fairness in assessment, feedback literacy development, and assessment innovation. Together, the two awards formally recognise my teaching excellence and ability to lead, influence, mentor, and sustain educational change at scale. This has really helped in the last few years at Kent as we’ve taken steps to modernise our own teaching practices.
Read more about Dr Edd Pitt’s National Teaching Fellowship on the Advance HE website.