Extra REF cash ‘will propel research culture’ in English post-92s

Significant increases to the recurrent excellence-driven research funding awarded to England’s modern universities will be crucial for leveraging additional private investment and winning important arguments over the future of these institutions, sector leaders have insisted.

Among the biggest winners from the latest allocations of quality-related (QR) grant funding – the first to use results from the 2021 Research Excellence Framework – are several post-92 universities whose annual awards will, in some cases, double or even treble: Northumbria University’s QR funding will increase from just under to £7 million to more than £18 million in total from 2022-23, while Manchester Metropolitan University’s share will double to £12.7 million.

Other modern institutions to benefit substantially from the redrawing of QR spending include Bournemouth, Coventry, Kingston, Huddersfield and Nottingham Trent universities, whose market share of funding will increase by more than 0.1 per cent, equating to millions more in research budgets. While nearly all Russell Group universities will also receive uplifts in recurrent grant funding thanks to a 10 per cent increase in Research England’s £1.97 billion total QR budget, many saw their share of overall funding fall following strong performances by newer universities in the REF.

John Senior, pro vice-chancellor (research and enterprise) at the University of Hertfordshire, whose annual allocation will rise by £3 million to £7.1 million, a 75 per cent increase, told Times Higher Education that most of the additional funding would support “existing areas of research excellence” but “it will also provide for some new future strategic developments, carefully aligned with current excellent research”.

However, additional funding was also important for winning political arguments internally and externally about the value of supporting research in modern universities, such as Hertfordshire, he added, stating that recent REF results confirmed that the university’s research performed “very well in comparison with research-intensive institutions”.

Such scores would support Hertfordshire’s view that it is “now positioned to make a future transition [towards growing research] to substantially improve its overall research performance even more”, said Professor Senior.

David Prior, director of research at Falmouth University, whose annual QR allocation will more than treble to almost £1.3 million in 2022-23 following its improved REF results, said that this uplift had greater importance than the extra revenue alone.

“It makes what we are already planning to do here on research – such as gaining research degree powers by 2030 – much easier to achieve,” said Professor Prior, who explained that while the extra investment was “significant”, it may be more useful if it helped win internal arguments about research investment, or encouraged industry to invest in research on campus.

Falmouth’s QR allocation was “never going to be so much that research becomes the main thing we do,” explained Professor Prior, whose university has an annual income of about £65 million, of which about £1 million is spent on research.

“In any case, we are not aspiring to be a ‘research university’ in that traditional sense but one where research is part of teaching, and vice versa, and knowledge exchange being the thing that ties them together,” he added.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com