REF 2029 guidance now confirms that the previously proposed people, culture and environment (PCE) element has been renamed strategy, people and research environment (SPRE). Its weighting has been set at 20 per cent, while the main contributions to knowledge and understanding element will make up 55 per cent of the overall profile. Compared with REF 2021, outputs no longer carry the 60 per cent weighting they once did, and the environment component has increased from 15 to 20 per cent.
Supporters of the change, including Wellcome’s John-Arne Røttingen, have been clear that this is not intended as a downgrading of research culture, instead describing the move as a rebrand designed to prevent “culture” becoming politicised, and as a way of preserving the momentum of efforts to improve research environments.
For early-career academics at the most insecure end of the system, however, research labour still sits outside what is easiest to count. What resists straightforward counting is also what is least likely to be protected.
Hidden research expectations
I am one year out of my PhD, in which I explored the “care-full” and “careless” dimensions of academic work. I graduated expecting that the next few years would involve short-term teaching, fractional contracts or, if things went well, fixed-term research roles. I also entered this stage of my working life knowing that, whatever job I took, I would need to keep publishing to stand any real chance of staying in higher education.
I write this with short-term teaching arrangements in mind. Within these roles, there is an unspoken contradiction. Many teaching contracts formally exclude research. At the same time, research remains a condition of future employability. It appears in shortlisting criteria, promotion thresholds and hiring decisions. The result is that research becomes an informal obligation. It is returned to between classes and tutorials, and carried into evenings, weekends and term breaks.
This is where the reframing of “culture” now matters.
Sustainability without supported labour
In REF 2021, the environment element required institutions to demonstrate the “vitality and sustainability” of their research environments. Guidance defined this in terms of research strategy, doctoral pipelines, research income, mentoring structures for early-career researchers and the capacity to continue producing high-scoring outputs. In arts, humanities and social sciences units in particular, panels praised institutions that could demonstrate early-career development pathways, including reduced teaching loads, research leave and internal funding.
SPRE retains the same two criteria of vitality and sustainability. In REF 2029, these will now be assessed through both an institution-level statement, weighted at 60 per cent of the SPRE score, and a unit-level statement at 40 per cent. The institution-level statement places explicit emphasis on strategy as the main way in which research environments and cultures are now explained.
This version of sustainability rests on the assumption that research labour is formally recognised and resourced. It does not capture the volume of research produced under contracts where research does not appear in workload models or time allocation at all. In practice, sustainability comes to mean whether outputs keep appearing, rather than whether the people producing them can realistically go on working like this when their next job may depend on it.
The limits of research expectation
It is true that REF 2029 introduces a substantive-link rule and allows outputs from staff on part-time or non-standard contracts, so long as they meet the 0.2 FTE, 12-month employment and research-expectation threshold. This complicates any straightforward claim that REF excludes precarious researchers. It also places the power of recognition firmly at institutional level.
REF 2029 requires that a contract include a “research expectation,” while the guidance does not require institutions to prove that time, funding or workload adjustment were provided to support the research. The term “research expectation” itself remains vague, and in practice it may amount to little more than a nominal clause. That ambiguity allows outputs to be counted even when the labour behind them was carried out under precarious, unsustainable conditions.
Culture was never going to be a perfect remedy. As Lizzie Gadd has already argued in her “my culture is better than yours” critique of competitive approaches to research culture, the sector’s engagement with culture has been uneven and often reflects the priorities of research-intensive, or more accurately funding-intensive, institutions and STEM disciplines. Even so, culture was the one part of the framework with the reach to ask how research expectations attach themselves to people, workloads and contracts. Political? Maybe. But what about precarity isn’t political.
What still counts
All of this is unfolding in the context of a wider financial crisis across higher education. Falling international recruitment, rising costs and long-term funding pressure have placed many providers under severe strain, with arts, humanities and social science provision often among the most exposed. In this environment, universities trade on the career aspirations of early-career academics to manage costs, relying on their, our, my hopes of progression to sustain teaching at lower pay and with fewer protections.
We now have a sector full of strategies, including ever more detailed strategies for people and research environments, and very little shared vision of what a sustainable early-career academic life should look like. With REF 2029 restoring the dominance of outputs and re-casting culture as a subsidiary part of institutional strategy, a clear message is taking shape. Outputs still count. The conditions under which those outputs are produced count for far less.
