INTRODUCTION

  The University and College Union (UCU) represents further and higher education lecturers, managers, researchers and many academic-related staff such as librarians, administrators and computing professionals across the UK. The union was formed by the amalgamation of the Association of University Teachers and NATFHE—The University and College Lecturers' Union on 1 June 2006.

  The UCU is about to embark upon a major consultation exercise with our members about the future of research funding and assessment. We are keen to hear members' views on wider issues such as the concentration of funding, the role of the research councils and the relationship between research and teaching, as well as their comments on metrics. However, in terms of the Government's consultation exercise, we would like to focus on two main areas.

1.  WHAT IS DRIVING THE REVIEW OF RESEARCH ASSESSMENT IN THE DIRECTION OF METRICS?

  The Government's answer is that it is intended to save universities and funders both "time and cost". However, the report from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) makes it clear that savings could be more easily made elsewhere, and indeed costs may be driven up by encouraging more unsuccessful grant applications. Like HEPI, we are particularly concerned about the potentially negative impact on longer-term "unfashionable" research and on research that doesn't chime with the interests of major research funders.

  Qn: Has there been a detailed "impact assessment" of the proposed shift to research income metrics?

  There is speculation that the real impulse behind this exercise is the need to demonstrate "value for money" to HM Treasury, and/or to provide an easy mechanism for the further concentration of research funding in a small number of universities. The UCU believes that the RAE has already led to an over-concentration of research funding in a small number of departments and institutions. In the last two decades the degree of concentration in UK university research funding has increased significantly. This contrasts with research funding in the US university system, where the trend has been in the opposite direction, and which is now less concentrated than its UK equivalent. 14

  Qn: Do we really want to see further concentration of research funding in UK universities?

  Whilst the metrics under consideration might have been expected to produce an "RAE similar" outcome, in fact a very different league table has been thrown up in which a number of post-92 universities with small amounts of RAE-linked funding are clearly punching well above their weight in terms of attracting grant income.

  Qn: Is this the main aim of the review to redistribute funding to departments and universities that specialise in applied research?

2.  A FUNDAMENTAL REVIEW OF RESEARCH FUNDING AND ASSESSMENT

  The Government is currently consulting the higher education sector over its reform proposals. Unfortunately, the consultation questions are narrowly focused on different forms of research income metrics. Although we welcome the inclusion of a final question on possible alternative forms of research assessment, we are sceptical about the open-ended nature of the current consultation exercise.

  In fact, the UCU believes that the consultation on metrics is getting in the way of the broader debate about how we fund research and its relationship to other activities in higher education—particularly teaching and "third stream" activity such as knowledge transfer, local and regional collaboration and income generation. The current debate is based on premises we might want to question—the assumption that we fund past performance rather than potential and capacity building, the assumption that the economy is best served through concentrated centres of excellence, and the assumption that the benefits of stability outweigh the dangers of ossification.

  Past debates in both the AUT and NATFHE have made clear that we want a system where multiple kinds of research, and related activity, are encouraged and funded, including speculative and long term research, user-focused, small scale applied research, collaborative and inter-disciplinary research and forms of scholarship that concentrate on creating synergy between research and teaching. If we want some evaluation of these activities—whether or not it then drives funding—then we need to explore the balance between capturing the full range of those things we want to recognise and value, yet doing so with minimum bureaucracy. Unfortunately, the Government's brief consultation document on research income metrics fails to deliver the type of broad-based discussion that is needed.

July 2006

14  Higher Education Funding Council for England, Review of research (00/37), HEFCE: Bristol, 2000, Table G5, p 62.