PGCert aims
What is the PGCert ultimately aiming to achieve?
PGCert leads may answer that question in a variety of ways: developing expertise, producing professionals, enhancing Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) engagement and cultivating reflective practitioners. The more they consider it, the longer the list grows, until they realise the PGCert is a complex provision, at the very heart of educating educators.
Some typical PGCert aims are:
- Professional growth and reflective practice: Develop reflective, critically in-formed educators who engage with SoTL and improve their practice over time.
- Evidence-informed pedagogy and design frameworks: Use and contribute to research and sound frameworks to guide teaching, learning and assessment design.
- Collaboration, partnership and scholarly community: Build peer dialogue, co-creation with students, cross-disciplinary learning and networks that en-dure beyond the course.
- Equity: Prioritise ethical practice, design with accessibility by default and address barriers faced by precarious, international and neurodivergent participants.
- Educator agency and navigating tensions: Strengthen confidence and judge-ment to respond to competing priorities, values and constraints in context.
- Student learning impact: Improve outcomes participants can influence and evidence, such as assessment literacy, feedback uptake, belonging and engagement.
- Institutional capacity and sustainability: Grow evidence-informed teaching through communities of practice and peer support that persist beyond cohorts.
Some aims will emerge during the PGCert and be more fully realised after completion.
The above list demonstrates that PGCerts serve many purposes, but they all relate to driving professional growth among educators while enhancing the quality of student learning experiences. PGCerts encourage participants to critically engage with evidence-informed practices and develop authenticity in their roles as educators. By creating a space for reflective dialogue and experimentation, PGCerts help educators bridge the gap between disciplinary expertise and pedagogical proficiency, ultimately shaping a culture of continuous learning within higher education institutions.
Beyond the UK, the PGCert is far from a localised initiative; it has expanded into many Commonwealth countries and beyond, becoming an international model to professionalise higher education practitioners. This global reach highlights the widespread recognition of its importance in raising teaching standards across various educational systems.
Why this book, why now
Although there were some staff development courses before then in the UK (and also in Australia and New Zealand), the 1997 Dearing Report called for better teaching standards and professionalised ‘training’ in UK higher education. The report recommended that institutions offer accredited teacher ‘training’, which led to the widespread adoption of PGCerts. These practice-based courses addressed the lack of formal teaching preparation for many academics, integrating theory with practice and encouraging reflective learning. The companion website pgcertdesign.com provides additional material, including an interview with Sally Brown and Phil Race about the history of the PGCert. In the UK, the Regulatory Framework for Higher Education sets a requirement that staff are appropriately qualified to provide a high quality academic experience to students (Office for Students, 2022). The professionalisation of the academic body through formal teaching development has been assoc-ated with improvements in the quality of education and has given impetus to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The PGCert has played an important role in transforming teaching and learning in post compulsory education worldwide, raising the profile of teaching-focused scholarship and practitioners and helping to counterbalance the perception that research is more important than teaching.
The timing of this book is particularly relevant. Institutions face rising demand for inclusivity, flexibility and education for sustainability, alongside heightened attention to outcomes and experience. PGCerts remain a primary vehicle to respond to these drivers by structuring development aligned with standards. The Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in the UK influences institutional reputation and student choice, which adds strategic focus to staff development while budgets remain tight.
What (I hope) you’ll get from this book
This book will equip you with practical tools, insights and frameworks needed to not only design and offer PGCert courses more effectively but also to create and evaluate a lasting impact on the teaching and learning culture in your institution. For example, you will find inclusivity notes after each contributed narrative to highlight ‘top tips’, Design decision summaries at the end of each chapter, Learning Outcomes mapped to learning thresholds, PGCert scheme of work, assessment ideas and brief templates, PSF 2023 mapping alignment to support course decisions. Examples and reflections illustrate plausible contribution to changes in educator practice and local student experience without claiming direct causal effects.
The contributed narratives introduce varied design perspectives for PGCert courses. By engaging with these experiences, you will be able to identify, adapt and implement approaches in your context to design more inclusive learning environments and create stronger courses.
How to use this book: if you are convening or redesigning a course, start with Part II for major design decisions; see Chapter 5 for assessment design and feedback practice; use Chapter 6 to plan evaluation; and consult the companion site checklist to audit your current provision. Throughout, I selected tools and examples with workload sensitivity and resource constraints in mind.
Design
The book title Designing Impactful PGCert Courses highlights the ‘design’ process, a fundamentally creative process. In education, it involves configuring various elements of a learning experience, understanding their relationships and planning how they will be delivered. Every teacher, to some extent, is a designer of learning as they orchestrate numerous aspects of their teaching practice. However, design in this context is more than just following a formula. It’s experimental and dynamic.
While we cannot design learning itself, this book treats ‘learning design’ as shorthand for ‘designing for learning’. It offers a practical framework and shared language to improve educational practice through intentionally inclusive design.
Although the terms ‘design’ and ‘planning’ are often used interchangeably, they represent distinct concepts. Design is about understanding the core issue, creating a framework to address it and identifying the learning goals and thresholds. It involves conceptualising the structure of a course, configuring its elements, determining assessment strategies and employing creative approaches. Planning, on the other hand, focuses on the practical implementation of these ideas: developing schemes of work and lesson plans to bring the design to life. This book is an exploration of what it means to be a better, more inclusive designer of impactful PGCert learning. It addresses both the ‘configuring’ and ‘enacting’ the design (Goodyear & Dimitriadis, 2013), going from designing, to planning and to implementing inclusive learning. Hence, through this book I invite you to see yourself as both the architect (with a design and a vision) and a builder (dealing with the practicalities) of more impactful PGCert learning environments and experiences.
My educational credo
My educational philosophy will become clearer as you read, but here is the gist. First, I believe teaching is a science, art and craft, as Johnson (2017) de-scribes. It is a science because it draws on a robust body of research and in-volves ongoing experimentation and data collection. It is an art because it requires creativity, adapting approaches to unique contexts like an artist blend-ing colours. Finally, it is a craft, honed through practice and experience, as teaching skills evolve over time. The book uses an inclusive lens to examine these dimensions.
Second, my philosophy reflects the seven conditions for effective learning outlined by Baume and Scanlon (2018):
1 Clear structure and scaffolding support learning.
2 High standards are explicitly communicated.
3 Learners build on prior knowledge and approaches.
4 Learning is active and task-focused.
5 Time on task is prioritised through practice.
6 Collaboration occurs between students and staff.
7 Learners receive and act on feedback.
Third, my approach is rooted in a socio-psychological perspective, examin-ing the interplay between teachers, students, methods, spaces (physical, digital and emotional) and assessment, with particular attention to the affective di-mensions of practice and their impact on motivation, engagement and learn-ing (Immordino-Yang, 2015).
Inclusivity is vital across these domains to create synergy. I discuss my values and my ‘roots-to-shoots’ approach in Chapter 1.
Finally, I adopt a ‘show rather than tell’ approach through the book’s 42 contributed narratives and case studies, which themselves serve as a powerful form of pedagogical ‘narrative inquiry’ (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).
Bibliography
Baume, D., & Scanlon, E. (2018). What the research says about how and why learning happens. In R. Luckin (Ed.), Enhancing learning and teaching with technology – What the research says (1st ed., pp. 2–13). UCL IoE Press.
Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. Jossey-Bass.
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. https://doi. org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906
Goodyear, P., & Dimitriadis, Y. (2013). In medias res: Reframing design for learn-ing. Research in Learning Technology, 21(1), 19909. https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt. v21i0.19909
Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2015). Emotions, learning and the brain: Exploring the edu-cational implications of affective neuroscience. W.W. Norton & Company.
Johnson, A. (2017). Teaching strategies for all teachers. Rowman and Littlefield.
Office for Students. (2022). Securing student success: Regulatory framework for higher education in England. https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/ regulatory-framework-for-higher-education-in-england/
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.
Citation
Rossi, V. (2026) Designing Impactful PGCert in Higher Education Courses – A Practical Guide for Staff Development. London: Routledge