The submission deadline for REF is autumn 2028. It is not very far away and there are still live debates on significant parts of the exercise without an obvious way forward in sight.
As the Contributions to Knowledge and Understanding guidance makes clear there are still significant areas where guidance is being awaited. The People, Culture and Environment (PCE) criteria and definitions will be published in autumn this year. Undoubtedly, this will kick off rounds of further debate on REF and its purposes. It feels like there is a lot left to do with not much time left to do it in.
Compromise
The four UK higher education funding bodies could take a view that the levels of disquiet in the sector about REF, and what I am hearing at the events I go to and from the people I speak to it does seem significant, will eventually dissipate as the business of REF gets underway.
This now seems unlikely. It is clear that there are increasingly entrenched views on the workability or not of the new portability measures, and there is still the ongoing debate on the extent to which research culture can be measured. Research England has sought to take the sector toward ends which have broad support, improving the diversity and conditions of research, but there is much less consensus on how to get there.
The consequences for continuing as is are unpredictable but they are potentially significant. At the most practical level the people working on REF only have so much resource and bandwidth. The debate about the future of REF will not go away as more guidance is released, in fact the debate is likely to intensify, and getting to submission where there is still significant disagreement will drain resources and time.
The debate also crowds out the other work that is going on in research. All the while that the future of REF is being debated it is time taken away from all of the funding which is not allocated through REF, all of the problems with research that do not stem from this quinquennial exercise, and the myriad of other research issues that sit beyond the sector’s big research audit. The REF looms large in the imagination of the sector but the current impasse is eclipsing much else.
If the government believes that REF does not have broad support from the sector it could intervene. It is faulty to assume that the REF is an inevitable part of the research landscape. As Chancellor, Gordon Brown attempted to axe its predecessor on the basis that it had become too burdensome. Former advisor to the Prime Minister Dominic Cummings also wished to bin the REF. UCU opposed REF 2014. Think Tank UK Day One also published a well shared paper on the argument for scrapping the current REF.
The REF has survived because of lack of better alternatives, its skilful management, and its broad if not sometimes qualified support. The moment the political pain of REF outweighs its perceived research benefits it will be ripe for scrapping by a government committed to reducing costs and reducing the research burden.
The future
The premise of the new REF is that research is a team sport and the efforts of the team that create the research should be measured and therefore rewarded. The corollary of identifying research as a product of a unit rather than an individual is that the players, in this case researchers and university staff, have had their skills unduly diminished, hidden, or otherwise not accounted for because of pervasive biases in the research landscape.
It is impossible to argue that by any reasonable measure there aren’t significant issues with equality in research. This impacts the lives and career prospects of researchers and the UK economy as whole. It would be an issue for any serious research funder to back away from work that seeks to improve the diversity of research.
It is in this light where perhaps the biggest risk of all lies for Research England. If it pushes on with the metrics and measures it currently has and the result of REF is seen as unfair or structurally unsound it will do irreversible harm to the wider culture agenda. The idea of measuring people, culture, and environment will be put into the “too hard to do” box.
This work is too important to be done quickly but the urgency of the challenge cannot be dropped. It is an unenviable position to be in.
REF 2030?
If a conclusion is reached that it is not feasible to carry the sector toward a new REF in time for 2029 there only seems to be one route forward which is to return to a system more like 2021. This is not because the system was perfect (albeit it was generally seen as a good exercise) but because it would be unfeasible to carry out further system changes at this stage. Pushing the exercise back to 2030 would mean allocating funding from an exercise completed almost a decade prior. It seems untenable to do so because of how much institutions will have changed in this period.
The work going on to measure PCE is not only helpful in the context of REF but alongside work coming out of the Metascience Unit and UKRI centrally, among others, part of the way in which the sector can be supported to measure and build a better research culture and environment. This work within the pilots is of such importance that it would make sense to stand these groups up over a long time period with a view to building to the next exercise, while improving practice within universities more generally on an ongoing basis.
As I wrote back in 2023 complexity in REF is worthwhile where it enhances university research. The complexity has now become the crux of the debate. If Research England reaches the conclusion that the cost and complexity of the desired future outstrips the capacity and knowledge of the present, the opportunity is to pause, pilot, learn, improve, and go again.
Tactical compromise for now – with the explicit intention of taking time to agree a strategic direction on research as more of a shared and less of an individual endeavour – is possible. To do so it will require making the political and practical case for a different future (as well as the moral one) ever more explicit, explaining the trade-offs it will involve, and crucially building a consensus on how that future will be funded and measured. Next year is a decade on from the Stern Review; perhaps it is time for another independent review of REF.
A better future for research is possible but only where the government, funders, institutions, and researchers are aligned.
