UK Higher Education is “shrinking” with 87 universities currently thought to have active redundancy and/or restructuring schemes in place. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) project proceeds regardless.
The previous REF (REF2021) is estimated to have cost £471 million and is being used to allocate approximately £15 billion of government funds to the 157 participating universities between 2022 and 2029. The average cost to each university is therefore £3million. Should we continue to engage with REF while we’re haemorrhaging staff across the sector? Are there any benefits for research culture that might offset the huge financial cost of taking part?
UK Higher Education has been pre-occupied with assessing research quality since at least the Research Selectivity Exercise in 1986. Successive exercises have refashioned the process in various ways. However, non-blinded peer assessment has been a constant (with clear potential for bias) as has the principle of performance-related-pay (or “Quality-Related” funding) in that government funding is determined by how a university performed in the previous research assessment exercise.
By its nature, UK research quality assessment does not lead to an equal distribution of Quality-Related (QR) funding; but is there an alternative basis on which to allocate funds? If QR funding were added to the UKRI funding available for competitive applications, it seems unlikely this would lead to more equal distribution. For example, a recent analysis of UKRI health research funding finds that 53.9% of funds are allocated to London, Oxford and Cambridge areas. This is similar to QR funding where over 50% is thought to be allocated to 10 universities including Oxford, Cambridge and various London colleges. In addition, 70.8% is allocated to Russell Group universities, a self-selecting group of 24 “research intensive” universities.
This concentration of research funding in the wealthier institutions and the least deprived areas of the UK has been noted as problematic by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) which, citing the Chief Medical Officer report in 2021, has in recent years sought to distribute funds and grow research capacity in areas where health burden is greatest. Examples of NIHR putting this into practice include the Health Determinants Research Collaboration funding and the Mental Health Research Initiative.
“To address this mismatch, the NIHR aims to broaden the current research base – which is largely concentrated in a small number of geographical locations – and boost capacity and capability to conduct applied mental health research across England”
Yet plans for REF2029 continue to be based on the concept of rewarding past research performance rather than addressing structural inequalities baked into the research assessment process from its earliest incarnations. Critical analyses and commentaries on REF have repeatedly referred to the way in which REF is used by government to nudge universities towards neoliberal compliant behaviours and attitudes including the drive for open access outputs and demonstration of research impact, which are argued to reinforce the “privatisation of knowledge”.
Less critical attention has been given to the “environment” component of REF and its capacity to serve a neoliberal agenda or an equalising strategy. The “environment statement” was introduced in 1996. In REF2021 it was worth 10% of the overall score. In REF2029 it will be worth 25% making it matter a lot more. In REF2021, the definition given was the environment “for supporting research and enabling impact within each submitting unit”. In evaluation or logic model terms, this sounds a lot like a process or mechanism for driving good quality outcomes rather than a quality indicator per se. This could, therefore, be seen as a move to increase incentives relating to the ways universities manage and deliver research and reduce incentives relating directly to the quality of research. In that sense it sounds a lot like another way to incentivise compliance with a set of valued behaviours. So what do those valued behaviours look like as REF2029 guidance starts to gather shape?
In a recent analysis of REF2021 environment statements, the main predictors of a high environment score were research income, staff volume and number of research students. A significant predictor of poor performance was “immature research environment” described as language emphasising support for staff to develop research skills or gain doctorates (as opposed to language demonstrating that most staff were already established, experienced and high performing). This would suggest that environment (as assessed in REF2021) was working in the opposite vein to current NIHR strategy to invest in institutions which show they are the most in need of research capacity development to support health improvements in their local population.
Since 2021, REF has undertaken an “indicators project” to identify new ways to assess environment which will use metrics which are (in theory) less open to bias. “Environment” will now be referred to as “People, Culture and Environment” (PCE). Universities currently taking part in the REF PCE pilot are now actively identifying ways that they can generate metrics which depict their environment in numeric forms. Metrics are being sought to demonstrate forms of collaboration, co-production and “connectivity”; equal opportunities for staff, staff and student diversity and “inclusivity”; strategies to address precarity; evidence of initiatives to address bullying and harassment. If these are the new neoliberal nudges set to be adopted by REF then they are not all terrible. However, it seems unlikely that the peer assessment process for the new metrificated PCE templates will have shed all vestiges of bias shown in REF2021 in which “immaturity” (or supporting staff groups to develop research capacity) was associated with low environment scores.
REF2029 does not appear to be moving in a similar direction to NIHR which seems to be attempting to allocate funds where they are needed geographically as opposed to where they have historically been amassed. Nevertheless, given REF2029 remains a significant lever for government to influence university management behaviour, it could still be worth staff groups engaging wit REF in order to benefit from certain more helpful developments. For example, if staff groups are concerned about bullying and harassment or precarity (which are explicit UCU campaigning issues), then REF2029 PCE indicators provide a useful basis on which to propose action. As a longer term vision, perhaps those thinking about how research funding could be allocated differently – in a way which could better enable research to improve the lives of local people – recent developments in NIHR strategy maybe a good place to start looking for ideas.
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The Research Excellence Framework in times of a shrinking higher education sector
by Susan McPherson Feb 12, 2025UK Higher Education is “shrinking” with 87 universities currently thought to have active redundancy and/or restructuring schemes in place. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) project proceeds regardless.
The previous REF (REF2021) is estimated to have cost £471 million and is being used to allocate approximately £15 billion of government funds to the 157 participating universities between 2022 and 2029. The average cost to each university is therefore £3million. Should we continue to engage with REF while we’re haemorrhaging staff across the sector? Are there any benefits for research culture that might offset the huge financial cost of taking part?
UK Higher Education has been pre-occupied with assessing research quality since at least the Research Selectivity Exercise in 1986. Successive exercises have refashioned the process in various ways. However, non-blinded peer assessment has been a constant (with clear potential for bias) as has the principle of performance-related-pay (or “Quality-Related” funding) in that government funding is determined by how a university performed in the previous research assessment exercise.
By its nature, UK research quality assessment does not lead to an equal distribution of Quality-Related (QR) funding; but is there an alternative basis on which to allocate funds? If QR funding were added to the UKRI funding available for competitive applications, it seems unlikely this would lead to more equal distribution. For example, a recent analysis of UKRI health research funding finds that 53.9% of funds are allocated to London, Oxford and Cambridge areas. This is similar to QR funding where over 50% is thought to be allocated to 10 universities including Oxford, Cambridge and various London colleges. In addition, 70.8% is allocated to Russell Group universities, a self-selecting group of 24 “research intensive” universities.
This concentration of research funding in the wealthier institutions and the least deprived areas of the UK has been noted as problematic by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) which, citing the Chief Medical Officer report in 2021, has in recent years sought to distribute funds and grow research capacity in areas where health burden is greatest. Examples of NIHR putting this into practice include the Health Determinants Research Collaboration funding and the Mental Health Research Initiative.
Yet plans for REF2029 continue to be based on the concept of rewarding past research performance rather than addressing structural inequalities baked into the research assessment process from its earliest incarnations. Critical analyses and commentaries on REF have repeatedly referred to the way in which REF is used by government to nudge universities towards neoliberal compliant behaviours and attitudes including the drive for open access outputs and demonstration of research impact, which are argued to reinforce the “privatisation of knowledge”.
Less critical attention has been given to the “environment” component of REF and its capacity to serve a neoliberal agenda or an equalising strategy. The “environment statement” was introduced in 1996. In REF2021 it was worth 10% of the overall score. In REF2029 it will be worth 25% making it matter a lot more. In REF2021, the definition given was the environment “for supporting research and enabling impact within each submitting unit”. In evaluation or logic model terms, this sounds a lot like a process or mechanism for driving good quality outcomes rather than a quality indicator per se. This could, therefore, be seen as a move to increase incentives relating to the ways universities manage and deliver research and reduce incentives relating directly to the quality of research. In that sense it sounds a lot like another way to incentivise compliance with a set of valued behaviours. So what do those valued behaviours look like as REF2029 guidance starts to gather shape?
In a recent analysis of REF2021 environment statements, the main predictors of a high environment score were research income, staff volume and number of research students. A significant predictor of poor performance was “immature research environment” described as language emphasising support for staff to develop research skills or gain doctorates (as opposed to language demonstrating that most staff were already established, experienced and high performing). This would suggest that environment (as assessed in REF2021) was working in the opposite vein to current NIHR strategy to invest in institutions which show they are the most in need of research capacity development to support health improvements in their local population.
Since 2021, REF has undertaken an “indicators project” to identify new ways to assess environment which will use metrics which are (in theory) less open to bias. “Environment” will now be referred to as “People, Culture and Environment” (PCE). Universities currently taking part in the REF PCE pilot are now actively identifying ways that they can generate metrics which depict their environment in numeric forms. Metrics are being sought to demonstrate forms of collaboration, co-production and “connectivity”; equal opportunities for staff, staff and student diversity and “inclusivity”; strategies to address precarity; evidence of initiatives to address bullying and harassment. If these are the new neoliberal nudges set to be adopted by REF then they are not all terrible. However, it seems unlikely that the peer assessment process for the new metrificated PCE templates will have shed all vestiges of bias shown in REF2021 in which “immaturity” (or supporting staff groups to develop research capacity) was associated with low environment scores.
REF2029 does not appear to be moving in a similar direction to NIHR which seems to be attempting to allocate funds where they are needed geographically as opposed to where they have historically been amassed. Nevertheless, given REF2029 remains a significant lever for government to influence university management behaviour, it could still be worth staff groups engaging wit REF in order to benefit from certain more helpful developments. For example, if staff groups are concerned about bullying and harassment or precarity (which are explicit UCU campaigning issues), then REF2029 PCE indicators provide a useful basis on which to propose action. As a longer term vision, perhaps those thinking about how research funding could be allocated differently – in a way which could better enable research to improve the lives of local people – recent developments in NIHR strategy maybe a good place to start looking for ideas.