The need to provide more significant rewards for "teaching excellence" in order to provide parity of status with research in higher education has often been asserted. This paper examines ways in which the idea of rewarding excellent teaching has been understood and translated within a large teaching and learning initiative that was overtly based on rewarding and recognising excellent teaching. The initiative studied here, was the formation of 74 Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, established by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2004. The findings are based on research that traced the "translation" of this policy aim in 15 institutions. The research found that the process of translation resulted in multiple interpretations of this agenda, including some that rejected the notion completely, raising some pertinent questions about policy formation in relation in teaching and learning.