From Semester 2 2026, the Feedback for Teachers (FFT) survey will no longer be available to teachers. It’s being retired as part of a wider change in how the University of Sydney collects and responds to student feedback on units, teaching and teachers – and the shift is designed to give teachers more recognition, stronger support, and feedback they can act on.
The FFT isn’t simply disappearing. Its functions are being replaced by two surveys that work together: the mid-session Teacher Check-in (TCI)*, which offers quick formative feedback while there’s still time to adjust your teaching, and the end-of-session Student Experience of Teaching (SET) survey*, which captures a fuller picture of how students experienced the unit and its teachers. Both are part of a move away from a patchwork of separate surveys toward more consistent, university-wide practices – a change we introduced in an earlier Teaching@Sydney post.
Here we focus on the FFT survey: why it’s being retired, what replaces it, and how the new surveys are designed to work for you.
*staff login required
How has the FFT been used?
The FFT has been a confidential, by-request service for individual teachers – available for specific teaching contexts, including tutorials, lectures, demonstrations, and online teaching. Teachers could order a short mid-session version (two open-text questions, turned around within a week so adjustments could be made for the current cohort) or a standard end-of-session version of ten questions.
It’s been popular and growing – from 4,362 requests in 2022 to 6,186 in 2025 – the bulk of them for tutorial teaching. Most striking is who uses it: around 80% of requests in 2025 came from casual staff and scholarship holders (HDR students who teach), with continuing academic staff making up the rest. For many casual and early-career tutors, the FFT has been a way to build a record of their teaching for job applications, professional learning and recognition; for continuing staff, a source of evidence for their Academic Planning and Development (AP&D) conversations and continuous improvement.
Understanding how teachers have actually used the FFT – and why they valued it – has shaped how the new surveys are designed to meet those same needs.
What the new surveys do better
The new surveys aren’t a like-for-like swap for the FFT – they’re designed to close some of its long-standing gaps. For teachers, the most meaningful practices in the new survey suite are around safety, confidentiality and support:
- Open-text comments are reviewed and, where appropriate, redacted before they reach you – a safeguard for staff wellbeing the FFT didn’t provide.
- Confidential feedback is clearly distinguished, with its distribution limited.
- Support is being built in for receiving and responding to feedback, so you’re not left to make sense of results on your own.
There’s continuity, too. The new surveys’ questions have been validity-checked by the Social Research Centre, and several questions from the FFT and the Unit of Study Survey (USS) have been carried over – so the feedback that mattered to you isn’t lost. Easing the overall survey load on students should also lift response rates, giving you more reliable feedback to act on.
Underpinning all of this is a practical reality: the old FFT and USS platform has reached end-of-life. The University has invested in a new, fit-for-purpose platform (Explorance Blue) designed to make surveys easier to run and report on – and to reduce staff workload.
When is this happening?
From Semester 2 2026, most teachers will be working with the Teacher Check-in (TCI) and Student Experience of Teaching (SET) surveys rather than the FFT.
Why “most”? Survey distribution depends on accurate teaching data flowing through the Online Teaching Allocation (OTA) tool, and not every unit is ready yet. Some – like workplace-based placement units – need a version of the survey still being co-designed to suit them. Others have more complex teaching arrangements whose data isn’t yet fully integrated into the new platform. Where a unit isn’t ready for the new surveys, such as intensives, units will still run the Unit of Study Survey (USS), so students’ feedback keeps flowing in the meantime. Other units will receive a modified version of the SET survey.
What’s certain is that the FFT itself will not be available in Semester 2 2026. Instead, teachers in small-group settings can receive feedback through the automated mid-session Teacher Check-in, and – if they meet the five-hour teaching threshold – through the end-of-session Student Experience of Teaching survey too. Reports go to individuals (for the Teacher Check-in) and to teaching teams and individuals (for the Student Experience of Teaching survey). Advisors, supervisors, promotions committees, Heads of School and education leaders will be ready to work with these data sets – and your previous FFT and USS feedback will continue to be valued in performance discussions.
Making the new surveys work for you
Here’s what the change means in practice: the new surveys carry institutional weight the FFT never had.
The Teacher Check-in (TCI) and Student Experience of Teaching (SET) surveys are recognised as valued evidence for the Education pillar of the Academic Excellence Framework (AEF), and they align with both the AEF and Academic Planning and Development (AP&D) processes. In other words, the feedback you gather now counts – formally – toward how teaching is recognised and rewarded. You’ll receive it as screened, automated reports, with confidentiality assured where appropriate, giving you more rigorous and comparable evidence of your teaching than the FFT could offer. The aim is that teaching excellence, at every level and for all staff, can be recognised and celebrated.
It’s worth getting familiar with the new surveys before they arrive and thinking about how you’ll encourage your students to complete them – response rates are what make the feedback useful. The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education and Students) (DVC-ES) portfolio is developing staff resources and student-facing campaigns to support survey completion and to remind students that they’re partners in their education.
The feedback you gather now counts – formally – toward how teaching is recognised and rewarded.
Want to know more?
The move away from the FFT is one part of a broader shift in how the University gathers and acts on student feedback. If you’d like to understand the thinking behind it, our earlier post on rethinking student evaluations sets out the principles guiding the change.
For the practical detail – when the new surveys run, what they ask, and how to make the most of them – visit the Student Evaluation of Teaching initiative page (staff login required).
If you have questions about what the retirement of the FFT means for you or your teaching, please contact the Division of Teaching and Learning.
