Celebrating teaching excellence at Manchester
05 Nov 2026
Colleagues came together in Whitworth Hall to celebrate this year’s Teaching Excellence Award winners and the contribution people across our University make to teaching, learning and the student experience.
What does excellent teaching look like? There is no single answer. It can be found in the way colleagues make learning more inclusive and accessible, how they listen and respond to students, the new approaches they develop to teaching and assessment, and the way people work together to create an outstanding student experience.
Those contributions were at the heart of this year’s Teaching Excellence Awards, celebrated at Whitworth Hall on Tuesday 3 November. Sarah Dyer, Associate Vice-President for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, shared the stories behind the winning nominations, with Jenn Hallam, Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students, presenting trophies and certificates.
Welcoming colleagues to the ceremony, Jenn reflected on the importance of recognising and celebrating the work taking place across our teaching community:
“It is always heartening to see colleagues taking time out of their busy days to celebrate their peers, and acknowledgement of this sort is so valuable both to the nominees and to the morale of our community.”
Celebrating excellence across our University
This year’s awards recognised three individual winners, Rachel Heyes, Caroline Hoyle and Aurelie le Normand, alongside the Drugs: from Molecules to Man project team and the Manchester Royal Eye Hospital in the Carys Bannister Building Optometry Clinics team.
They were joined by Highly Commended and Commended colleagues and teams from across the University, recognising contributions spanning inclusive education, flexible learning, assessment and feedback, student voice and educational leadership.
The breadth of those recognised reflects something important about teaching at Manchester. Excellent teaching and outstanding student experiences are created by people working in many different ways and roles. The awards recognise colleagues working across academic, technical, lab-based, library and professional services roles, as well as teams working together to make a difference.
As Jenn put it on the night: “Teamwork characterises so much of what we do to support excellent teaching, learning and assessment for our students.”
Part of a bigger story
The ceremony was an opportunity to pause and celebrate, but the work recognised through the awards is part of a much bigger story about teaching and learning at Manchester.
As we look towards Manchester 2035, the ideas, expertise and collaboration of colleagues across our University will be central to how our teaching and student experience continue to develop. This year’s award winners offer just some examples of the people helping to shape that journey.
And the ceremony is only one part of their story. Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more from some of this year’s winners, looking more closely at the ideas and approaches behind their work and what colleagues across Manchester can learn from them.
Congratulations to everyone recognised through this year’s Teaching Excellence Awards, and thank you to colleagues across our University whose work continues to make a difference to teaching, learning and our students.
- Find out more about this year’s Teaching Excellence Award winners and their work.