It is a truth universally acknowledged that in UK Higher Education Institutions excellent is the new good. With HEIs striving to achieve ‘excellence in teaching’ in order to attract the best students, questions are being asked about how to measure excellence and about whether or not lecturers are supported in doing so. How can lecturers devise reliable measures for evaluating the quality of their teaching? The following piece conceptualises the relationship between education research and practice in HE through discussing the sustainable integration of education research into teaching practice. The overarching aim is to discuss the potential for a pedagogy centred on the development of action research in educator development programmes and thus gauge how sustainable such practices can be in HE.