Like many other postgraduates in their final year, I think about my future career prospects a lot. The outlook is not great. The number of lecturers employed on precarious, short-term or hourly contracts is steadily increasing. According to data collected by the University and Colleges Union (UCU), higher education is second only to the hospitality sector in this regard.

The arrival of the government’s much anticipated green paper has simply added insult to injury. In particular, Jo Johnson’s supposedly sector-reviving Teaching Excellence Framework (Tef) and its link to increasing fees signals a huge attack on my profession.

Back in September, Johnson introduced the idea of the Tef by criticising research-focused academics, who fail to “go the extra mile”. The green paper continues in a similar vein, using data from the National Student Survey (NSS) to denigrate the quality of teaching.

Jo Johnson's university reforms: reactions from the experts Read more

There are two fundamental problems with this accusation. First, it ignores the simple fact that teaching quality varies because employment quality varies. As a graduate teaching assistant (GTA), I am expected to attend lectures, prepare seminars, provide feedback, answer emails and mark essays in a few hours a week. This means that my actual hourly pay is below the living wage.

This is not a unique situation. Last year, it was reported that wages fail to reflect the hours worked by GTAs. All of these teachers have master’s degrees and many of them have already completed their PhDs. Those with more experience earn around 15p more per hour.

As a union rep for GTAs, I’ve witnessed the sharp edge of this problem – workloads affect the mental health of my colleagues and low pay results in considerable financial hardship for some. We are already going the extra mile, and we’ve had enough.

Second, the NSS is neither a reliable nor a valid set of data (it is currently under review ahead of the 2017 survey). Premised on the idea that students are consumers, the NSS is tailored towards producing answers according to this agenda. As such, it is a management tool used to pursue course cuts and bully staff. The Tef is an extension of this. The idea that it measures “value for money”, while penalising or rewarding institutions with “reputational and financial incentives”, simply raises the stakes.

The Tef will not improve teaching standards. Instead, it will increase the burden on overworked and underpaid staff, exploited for their position at the very bottom of the academic career ladder.

But, I suppose I’m missing the point. I would hazard that it is naive to assume that this is what the Tef is actually trying to do.

In 2011, the coalition government said it hoped that the changes to the fee cap would result in different universities charging different levels for tuition. This didn’t work, with the vast majority of (cash-strapped) institutions opting for the maximum £9,000. The Tef is the next attempt to move towards varying fees, and this time there’s no choice.

The green paper suggests that the Tef will “increase students’ understanding of what they are getting for their money and … also provide better signalling for employers as to which providers they can trust to produce highly skilled graduates”.

This is a thinly veiled restructuring of higher education into a machine that caters to the interests of business, as are the metrics proposed to calculate these differences.

As well as the NSS, graduate employment data will be one of the determinants of teaching excellence. This is yet another blow. I teach a humanities subject that I am passionate about. I do not teach because I want my students to earn lots of money – that’s up to them. Instead, I think it’s important that they develop critical thinking skills and feel empowered by knowledge.

Seven rules the Teaching Excellence Framework should follow Read more

I do not want my students to feel pressured into a certain job by insurmountable debt and I especially do not want to judge current or prospective students according to how employable they are.

The Tef ignores all of the data linking socio-economic background to graduate earnings, and the only measure proposed to counter this (access targets) is something that is currently not working, and which every other aspect of the Tef (and the scrapping of grants) seems set against.

As the paper points out, “excellence” is the “sum of many factors”. What you think these are obviously depends on the outcome you envisage. I’d warn that the similarity of Johnson’s rhetoric to Jeremy Hunt’s response to the junior doctors’ contract row is telling.

Hunt’s attempt to present his new contract as a question of improving standards of care for patients mirrors Johnson’s promise of a better deal for students. In fact, both will simply make life harder for staff while opening the door to further privatisation.

Join the higher education network for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter @gdnhighered. Email article pitches to us at highereducationnetwork@guardian.co.uk