Scrap REF and allocate funds based on external grants – thinktank

Abandoning ‘bureaucratic’ exercise now would save universities £430 million, according to UK Day One

十月 8, 2024

Source: iStock/Jevtic

The UK’s “bureaucratic and unaffordable” Research Excellence Framework (REF) should be replaced with a system that allocates funding in relation to the number of external grants won, a leading thinktank has proposed.

Amid widespread concerns over the financial sustainability of the higher education sector, UK Day One, a research and innovation thinktank, has called for the expansive eight-year exercise to be scrapped – along with the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) – in favour of a low-bureaucracy system that saves the government and universities money.

Its report – published on 8 October – builds on the Tickell review from 2022 which advocated reform and the Labour government’s pledge to cut red tape for researchers. Authors highlight evidence that the REF is “overly bureaucratic and expensive”, is ineffective at improving research quality and discourages “blue sky” research.

They argue that REF 2029 should be replaced with a system where Quality-related Research funding is allocated to institutions in proportion to “external research income”, won by their researchers through grants from the private, public and philanthropic sectors.

While any reforms will “create winners and losers”, the thinktank believes that a system focused on external research income will result in a QR funding allocation similar to existing plans for REF 2029, but without the associated bureaucracy.

Such a big reduction in bureaucracy will give researchers more time and space to pursue blue sky research, it is claimed.

Authors also believe that incentivising universities to focus on increasing external research income will encourage them to support spin-outs and drive greater collaboration with local industry in line with Labour’s industrial strategy.

According to the report, scrapping the REF would be “cost-free and save money”. Provided costs have not increased further beyond REF 2021, it estimates that the new system would save approximately £17 million for research councils, and £430 million for universities.

“With pressures on both university and government finances, we can no longer afford an evaluation exercise which costs half a billion and fails to deliver clear benefits,” said Sanjush Dalmia, co-author of the report and former science policy adviser to Labour.

“An alternative system focused on external research income will cut red tape for researchers, improve research financial sustainability and incentivise collaboration with local industry, driving regional productivity growth.”

UK Day One said that because the KEF does not play a role in allocating funding, “universities have little incentive to improve their performance on these metrics” and therefore it should also be scrapped.

Replacing the REF would follow moves made by some other large sectors in recent years. Australia has already ended its Excellence in Research in Australia process, while New Zealand cancelled the upcoming round of its national research assessment exercise.

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com

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Reader's comments (6)

#1 Submitted by Ian Sudbery on 十月 8, 2024 - 12:48pm

Surely this just rewards people who are good at capturing grants, not people who use the subsequently aquired money well? There are many, many, many things wrong with REF, but at least it offers a pathway for academics who are good at doing research, but not good at writing applications and also bias the system towards fields that are more expensive. Why would a university support a research project that costs next to nothing other than the researchers time, but might change the world, when it could support a project that costs £5m to move incrementally in an already well supported field?

#2 Submitted by Anonymous Reader on 十月 8, 2024 - 2:05pm

Abolishing the REF would no doubt be warmly welcomed by academics: we could start planning a massive party on Not The Ref Day 2029 to celebrate its demise. However, I agree with Ian Sudbery that a replacement based on external research income alone risks being even worse. At one level, UK Day One's proposal does have the merit of honesty: the REF pretended to reward research quality, but has increasingly become about rewarding the production of institutional bullshit about research. Whereas a system based on external research income alone would be quite transparent about giving even more resources to those who already have the most as they are the most adept at producing bullshit in the form of research grant applications - since there is no correlation between size of research grants and quality of research. But it is not true that any reform has to create winners and losers. A fairer and simpler system would just allocate whatever research funding is available for any discipline equally between all researchers in it, so no-one has to be a 'winner' or 'loser'. To be fair, the Day One UK report does advocate a 'floor' for funding in proportion to the number of full-time equivalent research staff as a way of supporting smaller institutions. This is to be welcomed in at least guaranteeing a bare-bones level of research resource to all universities. But whether all researchers there actually get this basic resource would be dependent on the government finding a way of forcing managers to actually give the research funding allocated to universities to all researchers, rather than (as at present) introduce ever more fiendish internal schemes for pitting colleagues against one another, diverting funding away from researchers whose research enabled the university to get the QR funding in the first place and towards those who are most in with management. So if we're going to restructure the whole research ecosystem, even better would be to institute a 'ceiling' to prevent excessive capture of resources by a small number of institutions and individuals. Personally, I would advocate raising the 'floor' and lowering the 'ceiling' to the point where everyone in the same subject just gets the same resource. That way, no-one with a PhD and an academic post would ever have to waste time applying for a research grant again and we could just, you know, do research and be judged by results, rather than spurious predictions in grant applications.

#3 Submitted by comeyer132 on 十月 8, 2024 - 8:08pm

One could massively reduce the bureaucracy and politics around REF at the university level if the choice of which publications are to be submitted for evaluation was taken out of the hand of institutions. Instead, it would be the REF panel that would take a representative but random sample of what is to evaluated through the established process and criteria. At a stroke, most of the huge effort for internal evaluations, publication scoring and game-playing would stop because it would be pointless.

#4 Submitted by deheuty on 十月 8, 2024 - 9:31pm

REF will be difficult to abolish. Not with so many entities profiting directly and indirectly from doing it.

#5 Submitted by jane.prophet on 十月 9, 2024 - 2:32pm

This proposal does not adequately consider the inequities of UKRI funding; the relative paucity of funding in arts and humanities compared to STEM is just one issue that effects both the amounts and the number of grants awarded to non-STEM researchers. Nor would it validate/reward research conducted without funding, such as that often undertaken in humanities areas that nevertheless depends on staff having allocated research time (that research time is often paid for, at least in part, by the money coming in from the current REF)

#6 Submitted by acerpacer on 十月 11, 2024 - 7:34am

The amount of taxpayer money spent on internal evaluations is mind-boggling. This includes paying the evaluators and the staff time spent managing this process. This practice should be banned. The REF has, among other things, undesirable things, also created a market for REF consultants.