What comes next for Research England

England’s universities are one of our greatest national assets, producing among the largest share of the most cited research outputs of any country, and a talent pipeline to underpin our local regional and national economy.

Universities make a substantial contribution to the economies and communities they serve, while operating in a highly competitive global context. They contribute around £265 billion to the UK economy, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs in England and help generate innovative businesses through research and knowledge exchange. Universities are vitally important regional entities, connecting employers, skills, research expertise and innovation ecosystems. They crucially anchor value into their local and the wider UK economy.

Research England plays an important role in sustaining these strengths. Our vision is for a vibrant English university research and knowledge exchange system that remains globally competitive and evolves and responds to the needs of society and the economy. Through our stewardship, we help universities build on their individual strengths while contributing to a strong, connected and globally competitive research and innovation system. That means listening to the sector, understanding the pressures institutions face and making thoughtful choices about how public investment can best support research and knowledge exchange for the long term.

I’ve spent much of this year talking with people across the university sector: vice chancellors and pro vice chancellors, researchers early in their careers, professional services colleagues, and governing bodies. Whatever their role, everyone is grappling with the same tension: how do you build something resilient for the long term in a system under real financial pressure right now?

Today, I want to set out clearly how Research England is responding, and why I believe the path we’re taking, even where it means difficult change, is the right one.

Protecting core funding

Core research funding, including our mainstream QR funding and HEIF, is protected and will increase over the spending period.

This matters enormously. Unrestricted, flexible funding gives institutions the ability to respond to their own priorities rather than ours, and in a sector managing so many competing demands. We are prioritising these core funds for institutions.

What is changing from academic year 2027–28 is how we deploy some of our more targeted funding, and I want to explain the thinking behind that, on top of writing formally to all English universities today.

Over the last six years, we’ve invested £390m through three ring-fenced funds: enhancing research culture fund, participatory research fund, and the policy support fund. That investment helped build capability, generated new activity, and has given institutions the confidence and evidence base to make research culture part of their everyday thinking rather than an add-on. I’ve seen genuinely excellent work emerge from the innovation these funds enabled. Those ring-fenced funds are coming to an end as the work these funds supported reaches maturity. These non-recurrent funding programmes were introduced to stimulate change, not to continue indefinitely.

The question we had to ask was, “has it done its job?” For much of the sector, the answer is yes, providing the foundations to move from institutionally focused funded intervention towards embedded, sustainable practice. Extraordinary progress has been made with many exceptional initiatives and projects contributing to a rich seam of innovation and improvement to research environments across the institutions we support. But we also recognise that practice is not yet equally established everywhere, which is why we’re looking to move into a new phase, where the focus is on embedding what has been learned and developed into usual business; ensuring the best practice becomes common practice.

Making best practice common

We are investing up to £9m over the next three years in a new research culture collaboration network, comprising four regional coordinators, a dedicated coordinator for small and specialist institutions, and a central hub.

Alongside this, new funding interventions from 2027 will support collective action and shared capability-building across the sector. This is about bringing institutions together, enabling peer learning between universities facing similar challenges, and making sure good practice developed in one place doesn’t have to be reinvented everywhere else.

Together, these investments will help institutions learn from one another, spread effective practice, and embed sustainable improvements in research culture. We will also work directly with senior leaders and governing bodies, recognising that research culture must be led from the top. Through our terms and conditions, we will establish clear baseline expectations for all universities, while the Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE) element of REF 2029 will recognise and reward institutions that create outstanding research environments. Together, these measures provide a coherent framework of expectations, support and incentives for sector-wide improvement.

Alongside this change and as set out in our UKRI allocations explainer and March communication this year and in the context of UKRI’s prioritisation of infrastructure investment more broadly, we are reforming our research capital funding through changes to Research Capital Investment Fund. We will be introducing a higher minimum threshold and a cap on the maximum any one institution can receive, with the aim of spreading funding more widely and using it effectively.

We are also looking at how our funding can best support universities to translate their knowledge and expertise into wider economic and societal benefit. We’re consulting on changes to how HEIF is allocated, building on a review that found it delivers over £14 of economic return for every £1 invested. The consultation runs until 15 January 2027, and I’d encourage institutions and anyone with a view on how knowledge exchange funding should work, to respond. These are proposed changes, not a done deal: sector input will help inform the outcome.

None of this happens in isolation from the pressures the sector is already managing. I know many institutions are making hard choices about courses, staffing and where to find new income. Our responsibility at Research England is to deploy public funds as effectively as possible, while recognising the different circumstances institutions face and continuing to listen as we go. In support of fostering change and greater collaboration across institutions we recently launched a £19.75m funding programme Collaboration for a Sustainable Future, to support the most innovative projects that can create lasting change for a more sustainable research system across institutions.

This autumn’s announcements mark an evolution in how Research England works with the sector: less reliant on time-limited funding streams, more focused on embedding what works and supporting institutions to sustain effective practice. Our role is not to direct universities or diminish their distinctive missions, but to help create the conditions in which their strengths can flourish and contribute to a resilient, internationally competitive research and innovation system. I look forward to continuing the conversation with you about how we get it right.

Further information can be found on the UKRI website, providing further information on the outlined changes in this article including an English higher education sector circular letter. More information on REF 2029 can be found here.