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Currently English universities are responding to a recent government Green Paper which promises to deliver a raft of radical policy changes which could have a major impact on how excellence in teaching and learning is to be publicly acknowledged and rewarded. A significant, yet controversial proposal is the introduction of a «Teaching Excellence Framework» for universities. This paper examines and contextualises the current important policy debates and then presents some preliminary findings from a recent empirical case study which explored how research-intensive universities have valued, rewarded and supported excellence in teaching through institutional structures and also from the perspectives of academic staff responsible for teaching students. We argue that the reality on the ground for many academics is a sense of confusion and contraction around how their universities value and support high quality teaching and that there may be some way to go before some of the ideas and principles currently being discussed in the context of a national English Teaching Excellence Framework are fully embedded in practice.