REF guidance pause announced

The criteria setting and publication of final guidance for REF 2029 has been paused for three months.

The pause does not mean more time for research teams as the REF will still be carried out to the “original timeline” with any changes due to be announced in December 2025. This means that the final criteria and guidance will now occur after the autumn budget. The pilot report on the People, Culture and Environment element of REF 2029 will now be available at the end of October.

The REF team is now taking the opportunity to “take stock, ensure alignment with government priorities and vision for higher education, and reflect on feedback from the sector.” Readers may recall that references to People, Culture, and Environment, had been scrubbed from DSIT’s latest guidance letter to UKRI.

The practical consequence of the pause is there will be less time for research teams to adapt to the new guidance. The political fallout is also consequential.

The interregnum on what is being measured and how has opened up a much broader argument in the sector on whether research culture can ever really be measured, there has been more column inches on the portability of outputs than ever before, and the whole thing has absorbed an incredible amount of energy that could have been used elsewhere.

Simply, it cannot go on like this.

Given the level of disquiet within the sector it would be brave to open further engagements to arrive at the same conclusion on REF criteria. As I wrote back in July, some kind of compromise between the ideals of the current REF proposals and the familiarity of REF 2021 now seems more likely, if by no means certain, than it did a few months ago.

The promise by team REF is to “engage further with the sector in the coming months.” Hopefully, the engagements will either be on what is on the table to be changed and not be changed. Starting again with a blank piece of paper will invite a different version of chaos. Or it has to be on the presentation of new information emerging from the pilots or new analysis on what should be done now. The engagements are an opportunity for a considered way forward not for relitigations of the same arguments which are now well heard.

The best outcome at this stage, amongst a set of less than ideal outcomes, may be a model of REF that reassures the sector with more similarities to the REF 2021 exercise with a timeline toward greater change. The pause that REF may need is not just for this exercise, but one to lay the groundwork for change in the next exercise (it may even be time for another independent review.). Equally, additional funding through the budget to look at research environments would help take some of the pressure off REF.

The final sting in the tail for the sector could be the commitment to ensuring REF has “ alignment with government priorities and vision for higher education”. The government doesn’t yet have a published vision for higher education and the industrial strategy leans heavily toward applied science. The government’s research policy has been equally light, and how a dual funding system fits within their views of the research ecosystem, in an era where UKRI received a flat cash settlement and ARIA got a boost, is unclear.

And of course amongst all of this there are the hardworking university staff that just want a system they can work with where the rules are clear. REF is hard enough with enough pressure on it. Every month of pause is another month they will have to find from somewhere else.