REF survey on final policy developments launched

The four UK higher education funding bodies have launched a new REF survey designed to “[…]test the clarity, robustness and implementation of a small number of proposals that have emerged through the criteria-setting process.”.

This is not a rehashing of the debates on culture, decoupling, or weighting of the REF elements. Guidance is due in the Autumn and REF 2029 submissions open in just over a year from now. Therefore, the survey is focussed on a few specific areas where there is still space for debate.

The survey is now live. There are six sections for feedback which are of course all equally important but perhaps the most debated will be around around Strategy, People, and Research Environment (SPRE).

At the core of the challenge of SPRE is measuring work which promotes good research culture in a way which is replicable across institutions, proportionate to different kinds of institutions, captures both institutional and unit of assessment information, and measurable by REF panels. As a bonus side quest it also has to be designed in a way which reduces gaming in a system where everyone is incentivised to maximise their returns.

SPRE comes in two parts. There are institutional level assessment (IL) and unit level assessments (UL). These elements are assessed separately but they naturally feed into one another and assessors will look for coordination between units and the institution. At an institution level providers will be encouraged to use longitudinal data to show the development of their work over time. At a unit level assessors will guard against simply rewarding the highest volume of activity and instead look for quality within available resources.

On the gaming challenge the REF team is clearly alert to the fact that the decoupling process, removing individuals as the main source of submissions, leaves open the prospect of a skewed institutional submission. One of the areas they are consulting on is the clarity of the Statement of Representation (SOR). The SoR builds on the initial guidance and highlights proposals for a robust process for where a unit exceeds their maximum recommended submissions from a single substantive link, and where there are omissions of research areas.

Elsewhere, there are questions on engineering’s 100 word output statement, advice seeking on how outputs against more than onw Unit of Assessment should be fairly counted, and criteria building on the approach to equality related unit reductions. As ever with REF it is not a single research assessment exercise but the culmination of dozens of tweaks to years of work which, depending who you ask, provides a representation of the vast sprawling amount of research going on throughout the UK.

The survey is live now can be found at the REF website: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/news/ref-2029-launches-sector-survey-on-final-policy-developments/