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Professional Standards Framework

BCU Fellowship Scheme
Your Fellowship Journey
Supporting your journey
Mentor, Reviewer and Referee Roles

Your Fellowship Journey

Your journey to gain Fellowship recognition is personal to you - it is evidence of your own professional practice and is yours to take with you through your career. Recognition through the experiential route in the BCU scheme is gained through reflective narratives on how you teach and/or support learners in HE, why you work in the way that you do and what impact this has. You will also reflect on your future development to continue to enhance and advance your professional practice.

How you approach the application will depend on when you expect to submit; whether there is already evidence of the activities you intend to discuss, or if you will be working on activities for some time before submitting an application. In either case, the process is the same, and this allows us to record that you are working towards Fellowship recognition.

The application process

These are the steps to follow through your application process:

  1. Explore the AdvanceHE site and use the Fellowship Category Tool to help decide on the most appropriate Category; explore information on the BCU scheme on this site. If you require further information, you could attend an introductory workshop and/or contact your Faculty Lead (FL).
  2. Reflect on the proposed content of your application; make your own notes to refer to or, if it is helpful, complete an EPA (evidence of professional practice)
  3. Discuss plans with your FL; agree the intended Fellowship Category and a submission date (these are shown on our iCity site).
  4. Be allocated a Mentor by FL (or join a mentee group, where available); arrange an initial meeting with your Mentor and contact your referees.
  5. Work on your application and maintain agreed contact with Mentor.
  6. Check that your application meets all requirements and send the completed application to your referees at least two weeks before submission date, advising them of the required return date.
  7. Check you have all the application documentation - the completed application form, any associated evidence (if appropriate) and referees’ statements.
  8. Zip all the documents as one file and name the file by surname, category of application and Faculty/Dept. e.g. 'SMITH_D2_EDS'.
  9. Email your completed application as one file to psf@bcu.ac.uk; you will receive acknowledgement and confirmation of the expected decision date.

The PSF team, is part of the Education Development Service (EDS), and supports our PSF scheme overall, including overseeing the processes and updating documentation; if you have any feedback on these, do contact us at psf@bcu.ac.uk.