Category: Research

  • Making creative practice research visible

    Making creative practice research visible

    I still remember walking into my first Association of Media Practice Educators conference, sometime around the turn of the millennium.

    I was a very junior academic, wide-eyed and slightly overwhelmed. Until that point, I’d assumed research lived only in books and journals.

    My degree had trained me to write about creative work, not to make it.

    That event was a revelation. Here were filmmakers, designers, artists, and teachers talking about the doing as research – not as illustration or reflection, but as knowledge in its own right. There was a sense of solidarity, even mischief, in the air. We were building something together: a new language for what universities could call research.

    When AMPE eventually merged with MeCCSA – the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association – some of us worried that the fragile culture of practice would be swallowed by traditional academic habits. I remember standing in a crowded coffee queue at that first joint conference, wondering aloud whether practice would survive.

    It did. But it’s taken twenty-five years to get here.

    From justification to circulation

    In the early days, the fight was about legitimacy. We were learning to write short contextual statements that translated installations, performances, and films into assessable outputs. The real gatekeeper was always the Research Excellence Framework. Creative practice researchers learned to speak REF – to evidence, contextualise, and theorise the mess of creative making.

    Now that argument is largely won. REF 2021 explicitly recognised practice research. Most universities have templates, repositories, and internal mentors to support it. There are still a few sceptics muttering about rigour, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

    If creative practice makes knowledge, the challenge today is not justification. It’s circulation.

    Creative practice is inherently cross-disciplinary. It doesn’t sit neatly in the subject silos that shape our academic infrastructure. Each university has built its own version of a practice research framework – its own forms, repositories, and metadata – but the systems don’t talk to one another. Knowledge that begins in the studio too often ends up locked inside an institutional database, invisible to the rest of the world.

    A decade of blueprints

    Over the past few years, a string of national projects has tried to fix that.

    PRAG-UK, funded by Research England in 2021, mapped the field and called for a national repository, metadata standards, and a permanent advisory body. It was an ambitious vision that recognised practice research as mature and ready to stand alongside other forms of knowledge production.

    Next came Practice Research Voices and SPARKLE in 2023 – both AHRC-funded, both community-driven. PR Voices, led by the University of Westminster, tested a prototype repository built on the Cayuse platform. It introduced the idea of the practice research portfolio – a living collection that links artefacts, documentation, and narrative. SPARKLE, based at Leeds with the British Library and EDINA, developed a technical roadmap for a national infrastructure, outlining how such a system might actually work.

    And now we have ENACT – the Practice Research Data Service, funded through UKRI’s Digital Research Infrastructure programme and again led by Westminster. ENACT’s job is to turn all those reports into something real: a national, interoperable, open data service that makes creative research findable, accessible, and reusable. For the first time, practice research is being treated as part of the UK’s research infrastructure, not a quirky sideshow to it.

    A glimpse of community

    In June 2025, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted The Future of Practice Research. For once, everyone was in the same room – the PRAG-UK authors, the SPARKLE developers, the ENACT team, funders, librarians, and plenty of curious researchers. We swapped notes, compared schemas, and argued cheerfully about persistent identifiers.

    It felt significant – a moment of coherence after years of fragmentation. For a day, it felt like we might actually build a network that could connect all these efforts.

    A few weeks later, I found myself giving a talk for Loughborough University’s Capturing Creativity webinar series. Preparing for that presentation meant gathering up a decade of my own work on creative practice research – the workshops I’ve designed, the projects I’ve evaluated, the writing I’ve done to help colleagues articulate their practice as research. In pulling all that together, I realised how cyclical this story is.

    Back at that first AMPE conference, we were building a community from scratch. Today, we’re trying to build one again – only this time across digital platforms, data standards, and research infrastructure.

    The policy challenge

    If you work in research management, this is your problem too. Practice research now sits comfortably inside the REF, but not inside the systems that sustain the rest of academia. We have no shared metadata standards, no persistent identifiers for creative outputs, and no national repository.

    Every university has built its own mini-ecosystem. None of them connect.

    The sector needs collective leadership – from UKRI, the AHRC, Jisc, and Universities UK – to treat creative practice research as shared infrastructure. That means long-term funding, coordination across institutions, and skills investment for researchers, librarians, and digital curators.

    Without that, we’ll keep reinventing the same wheel in different corners of the country.

    Coming full circle

    Pulling together that presentation for Capturing Creativity reminded me how far we’ve come – and how much remains undone. We no longer need to justify creative practice as research. But we still need to build the systems, the culture, and the networks that let it circulate.

    Because practice research isn’t just another output type. It’s the imagination of the academy made visible.

    And if the academy can’t imagine an infrastructure worthy of its own imagination, then we really haven’t learned much from the last twenty-five years.

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  • Northern Ireland can be a testbed for research culture

    Northern Ireland can be a testbed for research culture

    In higher education, talk of “research culture” can sometimes feel abstract. We know it matters, but what does it actually look like in practice – and how do you change it?

    Today, we’re publishing a new report on research culture in Northern Ireland that tries to answer some of those questions. Produced in partnership with CRAC-Vitae as part of the Research Culture Northern Ireland (RCNI) initiative, and supported by the Wellcome Trust, the report draws insights from across universities, government, industry, and the voluntary sector.

    Our aim was to explore how research is experienced in a small but vibrant ecosystem, and to test whether Northern Ireland might offer a different perspective on research culture – one that could be of interest not only here, but to other regions of the UK and beyond.

    Why Northern Ireland, why now?

    Northern Ireland’s research ecosystem is distinctive. Our higher education sector is small but high-performing, regularly punching above its weight in UK and international rankings. We are separated from the rest of the UK by the Irish Sea, but uniquely, we share a land border with the EU – creating opportunities for cross-border collaboration.

    Yet there are challenges too. Levels of innovation and productivity remain lower than in the UK and Ireland overall. Access to research funding is uneven. Career mobility is limited, partly shaped by geography.

    At the same time, research and innovation are high on the policy agenda. The Northern Ireland Executive’s Programme for Government highlights ambitious R&I plans, including the creation of a regional strategy to support key sectors such as cyber security and software, advanced manufacturing and life and health sciences. The appointment of Northern Ireland’s first Chief Scientific and Technology Adviser signals stronger leadership in this space, and with the CSTA shortly bringing the regional R&I strategy forward for consultation, it highlights the significant developments since the report on research culture was commissioned. The Belfast Region City Deal is creating new innovation centres, while a recently published Collaborative Innovation Plan represents a coordinated commitment by Innovate UK, the Department for the Economy and Invest NI to accelerate inclusive and sustainable innovation across the region.

    To harness these opportunities, we need a research culture that enables collaboration across sectors, supports the talent we already have, and makes the region an attractive place for others to come and do research.

    Finding out

    Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University jointly created RCNI with support from the Wellcome Trust to explore research culture in more depth, and to test interventions that might help address challenges.

    Alongside pilot projects on postdoctoral careers, practice-as-research, and the role of research professionals, we commissioned CRAC-Vitae to examine Northern Ireland’s research ecosystem through survey data (167 responses), interviews (17), and focus groups. The aim was not only to generate evidence specific to our context, but also to explore whether familiar UK-wide challenges looked different – or perhaps more visible – in a small system.

    The findings are grouped into five themes. None of them are unique to Northern Ireland – but they resonate in ways that may feel familiar to colleagues elsewhere:

    Collaboration and coordination. Collaboration is widespread, with 80 per cent of respondents reporting that they had worked with an external organisation. However, qualitative data revealed that collaborations are often informal, relying on personal networks. Smaller organisations can be excluded, and visibility across the system is limited.

    Career pathways and talent development. Career progression is constrained by limited opportunities with 59 per cent of respondents identifying a lack of progression routes. Pathways are often fragmented, and cross-sector mobility remains low, with 52 per cent of respondents reporting difficulty moving between sectors. Talent is underutilised as a result.

    Understanding and communicating the value of research. Research has enormous civic and community benefits, but these are undervalued and misunderstood – limiting recognition and policy impact.

    Reducing administrative burden. Bureaucracy, compliance, and regulatory hurdles disproportionately affect SMEs and non-HE actors, creating inefficiencies and blocking participation.

    Strategic vision and system reform. Stakeholders see a fragmented and opaque system, lacking shared vision and coherence – only 31 per cent of survey respondents agreed there is a shared strategic vision for R&I in NI – a situation compounded by political instability.

    We know this is a small sample and just one piece in a growing evidence base. But it offers useful starting points for further discussion – and perhaps areas where regions could work together.

    Reflections for small regions

    Looking across these findings, a few reflections stand out that may be of interest to other small regions with strong research ecosystems.

    First, proximity can be a strength. The size and concentration of institutions, government, and industry in a defined area creates real opportunities to build effective networks and shared understanding of barriers. In particular, it can help identify and tackle bureaucratic friction more quickly.

    Next, that collaboration is essential – but needs structure. In small systems, personal connections carry weight. That can be a strength, but risks becoming exclusive and unwelcoming to newcomers. Creating formal mechanisms for inclusion is key.

    There’s also work to be done on harnessing existing talent. With only a handful of research-intensive institutions, we need to do more to support and retain the talent we already have. Not every research student or postdoc will have an academic career – but their skills are vital to other sectors and to addressing regional challenges.

    Finally, a joined-up voice matters. A coherent strategic focus and communication plan helps small regions do more with less. Playing to strengths, and presenting a clear message externally, is critical to attracting funding and partnerships. This project, a partnership between Queen’s and Ulster, embodies that.

    These are not answers, but starting points for reflection – and perhaps for collaboration across regions that face similar issues.

    Where could this go?

    We are realistic: these challenges cannot be solved by one project, or even one region. Our next steps will therefore follow a dual approach: influencing system-level reforms through evidence, advocacy, and convening – recognising that changes to policy and funding lie with government and funders – and also testing project-level interventions through pilot projects, generating practical learning that might inform broader reforms.

    The first of these involves a new collaboration with CRAC-Vitae to pilot innovative approaches to tracking the career outcomes of postdoctoral researchers in Northern Ireland. This aligns with our “people first” focus for this project, recognising that our research and innovation ecosystem is nothing without the talent and ideas that populate it.

    If successful, we hope that coordinated career tracking will help identify mobility trends, sectoral destinations, and skill gaps across the R&I workforce – providing the evidence needed to strengthen cross-sector pathways and retain and develop talent within NI’s R&I ecosystem.

    Building on other RCNI work exploring postdoctoral career development, these efforts aim to build a clearer picture of how people move through and beyond the research ecosystem – and how policies and practices can better support their progression.

    Although modest in scale, this pilot will address an area with little existing evidence and may offer a model for others seeking to strengthen mobility and progression across the research ecosystem.

    An invitation to reflect

    So what does this mean for colleagues elsewhere? We don’t claim to have the answers. But we think Northern Ireland’s experience highlights issues that many regions face – and raises questions that might be useful to explore collectively.

    If proximity can be a strength, how do we best harness it? If collaboration relies too heavily on personal networks, how do we make it more inclusive? If we want to value research talent beyond academia, how do we support those careers in practice? And if small regions need a joined-up voice, how do we achieve it without losing diversity?

    Northern Ireland is a small system, but that makes its challenges and opportunities more visible. We hope this report is not only useful here, but a provocation to reflect on how small research ecosystems across the UK – and beyond – might learn together.

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  • Clean energy research funds under threat – Campus Review

    Clean energy research funds under threat – Campus Review

    There has been much excitement since Australia signed a landmark agreement with the United States last month to expand cooperation on critical minerals and rare earth elements.

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  • Change the incentives to change the economy

    Change the incentives to change the economy

    Incentives are a delicate thing.

    As we learned from the former chief executive of UKRI, if you try to measure every single outcome, every pound spent, and direct every bit of the ecosystem toward something (whatever that something is) it’s possible to cause an enormous amount of damage. Get the input wrong, follow the wrong priority, or make a decision on a less than full picture amongst all of the complexities in an ecosystem and then enormous sums of money can be wasted.

    The underlying assumption in the public theory of research is that directing research toward a clearer end is desirable, possible, and value for money. Intuitively this makes sense. The central feature of modern economic thought is that firms should specialise within a market. In doing so they develop expertise, market advantage, and the wider economy benefits from the most innovative and efficient firms. Market competition then dictates who gets to be the most profitable firms until new firms come along and old firms die through a process of creative destruction.

    Advantages

    In business R&D forms part of the critical advantage. In theory, the firms that can make the most use of the right R&D assets (tangible and intangible) should be the most innovative, secure the greatest market share, and then grow their profits. R&D spending has natural constraints within business. A defence firm is not going to spend money on research outside of defence any more than a carpenter is going to spend money on hypersonic missiles.

    Universities do not face any such natural constraints. In fact, they have precisely the opposite incentive where to maximise income (not profitability) they should do as much research and research adjacent activity as possible. As long as a link between volume, income, and reputation exists, the rational seeking university should do as much as possible. As a secondary benefit is that it is also easier to tell staff, governments, funders, that universities will do more, not less.

    The three major constraints in universities are capital, capacity (staff and facilities), and the direction of funding bodies. If the funding incentive is toward doing more then if the government wishes to introduce greater specialisation in the sector, as set out in the post-16 white paper, it must therefore introduce some new incentives. In particular, as purely from an incentive perspective, it makes very little difference to universities whether their research is economically useful or not.

    The white paper sets out lots of things the government might do including moving teaching incentives through research, changing the REF, rewarding research potential, and encouraging universities to do fewer things better. Post white paper there have been two key research announcements that highlight the difficulty in setting out the right incentives. The funding allocations to UKRI which we will know more about in December and some mooted reforms of HEIF.

    The reform of HEIF promises to introduce new accountability statements tied to a reform of the funding formula over the next few years. The first part of the reform is that universities will be expected to demonstrate how HEIF funding is contributing to economic growth amongst other goals. There is very little knowledge exchange activity where if you squint hard enough it does not contribute to economic growth. This isn’t a strong incentive but a useful nudge toward what universities should be doing. Over time, it is possible to see how the new methodology with a greater focus on causal links and inputs could lead to a different kind of HEIF.

    Outcomes

    If the HEIF is going to be “outcomes focussed” this implies that HEIF should be more actively driving university activity toward specialisation within a local, national, and regional context. This would align closely with the white paper but HEIf is only a small portion of the overall funding research mix. Should the government think there needs to be more economic-growth align university activity, and it thinks HEIF is a tool to do that, it should consider whether it can improve the HEIF incentives with greater funding.

    The proof will be whether the changing accountability statements produce and new activity or whether universities simply account for their existing activity in a different way. Perhaps the more interesting reforms will come in 2027-28, at the earliest, where there will be a review to the funding formula to support contributions to economic growth.

    It would be an error if this was carried out in isolation and not as part of a wider look at the incentives in research. HEIF cannot move the sector toward more useful economic research ends alone and nor will it change the underlying unit of resource which encourages universities to do everything all of a time. HEIF can be a message, a guide, a statement, but without shifting funding it will not be a bigger enough incentive to move the sector.

    It would also be an error if HEIF’s accountability statements and any funding revisions flow to the same places to cover the same activity. Specialisation implies winners and losers but aggregate benefit across the sector and for the economy. The revision to funding formula could, for example, fund different kinds of economic activities differently, add regional multipliers, reward collaborations different, or any other number of useful economic objectives.

    The challenge is that however the incentives are constructed they must be coherent with the wider direction of travel set out in the white paper. The opportunity is to use research funding to reward the places doing economically interesting things that aren’t always recognised in traditional research metrics.

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  • Australia signs research pact with China – Campus Review

    Australia signs research pact with China – Campus Review

    Universities Australia has signed a deal with China that will encourage research collaboration and student exchanges between the two countries.

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  • Program stops early-career researchers quitting – Campus Review

    Program stops early-career researchers quitting – Campus Review

    Universities need workers with comprehensive analytical and strategic skills, but funding cuts and progression barriers have caused retention issues, leading to early-career researchers leaving universities in droves.

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  • The white paper is wrong – changing research funding won’t change teaching

    The white paper is wrong – changing research funding won’t change teaching

    The Post-16 education and skills white paper might not have a lot of specifics in it but it does mostly make sense.

    The government’s diagnosis is that the homogeneity of sector outputs is a barrier to growth. Their view, emerging from the industrial strategy, is that it is an inefficient use of public resources to have organisations doing the same things in the same places. The ideal is specialisation where universities concentrate on the things they are best at.

    There are different kinds of nudges to achieve this goal. One is the suggestion that the REF could more closely align to the government missions. The detail is not there but it is possible to see how impact could be made to be about economic growth or funding could be shifted more toward applied work. There is a suggestion that research funding should consider the potential of places (maybe that could lead to some regional multipliers who knows). And there are already announced steps around the reform on HEIF and new support for spin-outs.

    Ecosystems

    All of these things might help but they will not be enough to fundamentally change the research ecosystem. If the incentives stay broadly the same researchers and universities will continue to do broadly the same things irrespective of how much the government wants more research aimed at growing the economy.

    The potentially biggest reform has the smallest amount of detail. The paper states

    We will incentivise this specialisation and collaboration through research funding reform. By incentivising a more strategic distribution of research activity across the sector, we can ensure that funding is used effectively and that institutions are empowered to build deep expertise in areas where they can lead. This may mean a more focused volume of research, delivered with higher-quality, better cost recovery, and stronger alignment to short- and long-term national priorities. Given the close link between research and teaching, we expect these changes to support more specialised and high quality teaching provision as well.

    The implication here is that if research funding is allocated differently then providers will choose to specialise their teaching because research and teaching are linked. Before we get to whether there is a link between research funding and teaching (spoiler there is not) it is worth unpacking two other implications here.

    The first is that the “strategic distribution” element will have entirely different impacts depending on what the strategy is and what the distribution mechanism is. The paper states that there could, broadly, be three kinds of providers. Teaching only, teaching with applied research, and research institutions (who presumably also do teaching.) The strategy is to allow providers to focus on their strengths but the problem is it is entirely unclear which strengths or how they will be measured. For example, there are some researchers that are doing research which is economically impactful but perhaps not the most academically ground breaking. Presumably this is not the activity which the government would wish to deprioritise but could be if measured by current metrics. It also doesn’t explain how providers with pockets of research excellence within an overall weaker research profile could maintain their research infrastructure.

    The white paper suggests that the sector should focus on fewer but better funded research projects. This makes sense if the aim is to improve the cost recovery on individual research projects but improving the unit of resource through concentrating the overall allocation won’t necessarily improve financial sustainability of research generally. A strategic decision to align research funding more with the industrial strategy would leave some providers exposed. A strategic decision to invest in research potential not research performance would harm others. A focus on regions, or London, or excellence wherever it may be, would have a different impact. The distribution mechanism is a second order question to the overall strategy which has not yet dealt with some difficult trade offs

    On its own terms it also seems research funding is not a good indicator of teaching specialism.

    Incentives

    When the White Paper suggests that the government can “incentivise specialisation and collaboration through research funding reform”, it is worth asking what – if any – links there currently are between research funding and teaching provision.

    There’s two ways we can look at this. The first version looks at current research income from the UK government to each provider(either directly, or via UKRI) by cost centre – and compares that to the students (FTE) associated with that cost centre within a provider.

     

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    We’re at a low resolution – this split of students isn’t filterable by level or mode of study, and finances are sometimes corrected after the initial publication (we’ve looked at 2021-22 to remove this issue). You can look at each cost centre to see if there is a relationship between the volume of government research funding and student FTE – and in all honesty there isn’t much of one in most cases.

    If you think about it, that’s kind of a surprise – surely a larger department would have more of both? – but there are some providers who are clearly known for having high quality research as opposed to large numbers of students.

    So to build quality into our thinking we turn to the REF results (we know that there is generally a good correlation between REF outcomes and research income).

    Our problem here is that REF results are presented by unit of assessment – a subject grouping that maps cleanly neither to cost centres or to the CAH hierarchy used more commonly in student data (for more on the wild world of subject classifications, DK has you covered). This is by design of course – an academic with training in biosciences may well live in the biosciences department and the biosciences cost centre, but there is nothing to stop them researching how biosciences is taught (outputs of which might be returned to the Education cost centre).

    What has been done here is a custom mapping at CAH3 level between subjects students are studying and REF2021 submissions – the axis are student headcount (you can filter by mode and level, and choose whichever academic year you fancy looking at) against the FTE of staff submitted to REF2021 – with a darker blue blob showing a greater proportion of the submission rated as 4* in the REF (there’s a filter at the bottom if you want to look at just high performing departments).

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    Again, correlations are very hard to come by (if you want you can look at a chart for a single provider across all units of assessment). It’s almost as if research doesn’t bring in money that can cross-subsidise teaching, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever worked in higher education.

    Specialisation

    The government’s vision for higher education is clear. Universities should specialise and universities that focus on economic growth should be rewarded. The mechanisms to achieve it feel, frankly, like a mix of things that have already been announced and new measures that are divorced from the reality of the financial incentives universities work under.

    The white paper has assiduously ducked laying out some of the trade-offs and losers in the new system. Without this the government cannot set priorities and if it does not move some of the underlying incentives on student funding, regional funding distribution, greater devolution, supply-side spending like Freeports, staff reward and recognition, student number allocations, or the myriad of things that make up the basis of the university funding settlement, it has little hope of achieving its goals in specialisation or growth.

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  • The REF helps make research open, transparent, and credible- let’s not lose that

    The REF helps make research open, transparent, and credible- let’s not lose that

    The pause to reflect on REF 2029 has reignited debate about what the exercise should encompass – and in particular whether and how research culture should be assessed.

    Open research is a core component of a strong research culture. Now is the time to take stock of what has been achieved, and to consider how REF can promote the next stage of culture change around open research.

    Open research can mean many things in different fields, as the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science makes clear. Wherever it is practiced, open research shifts focus away from outputs and onto processes, with the understanding that if we make the processes around research excellent, then excellent outcomes will follow

    Trust

    Being open allows quality assurance processes to work, and therefore research to be trustworthy. Although not all aspects of research can be open (sensitive personal data, for example), an approach to learning about the world that is as open as possible differentiates academic research from almost all other routes to knowledge. Open research is not just a set of practices – it’s part of the culture we build around integrity, collaboration and accountability.

    But doing research openly takes time, expertise, support and resources. As a result, researchers can feel vulnerable. They can worry that taking the time to focus on high-quality research processes might delay publication and risk them being scooped, or that including costs for open research in funding bids might make them less likely to be funded; they worry about jeopardising their careers. Unless all actors in the research ecosystem engage, then some researchers and some institutions will feel that they put themselves at a disadvantage.

    Open research is, therefore, a collective action problem, requiring not only policy levers but a culture shift in how research is conducted and disseminated, which is where the REF comes in.

    REF 2021

    Of all the things that influence how research is done and managed in the UK HE sector, the REF is the one that perhaps attracts most attention, despite far fewer funds being guided by its outcome than are distributed to HEIs in other ways.

    One of the reasons for this attention is that REF is one of the few mechanisms to address collective action problems and drive cultural change in the sector. It does this in two ways, by setting minimum standards for a submission, and by setting some defined assessment criteria beyond those minimum standards. Both mechanisms provide incentives for submitting institutions to behave in particular ways. It is not enough for institutions to simply say that they behave in this way – by making submissions open, the REF makes institutions accountable for their claims, in the same way as researchers are made accountable when they share their data, code and materials.

    So, then, how has this worked in practice?

    A review of the main panel reports from REF 2021 shows that evidence of open research was visible across all four main panels, but unevenly distributed. Panel A highlighted internationally significant leadership in Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care (UoA 2) and Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience (UoA 4), while Panel B noted embedded practices in Chemistry (UoA 8) and urged Computer Science and Informatics (UoA 11) to make a wider shift towards open science through sharing data, software, and protocols. Panel C pointed to strong examples in Geography and Environment Studies (UoA 14), and in Archaeology (UoA 15), where collaboration, transparency, and reproducibility were particularly evident. By contrast, Panel D – and parts of Panel C – showed how definitions of open research can be more complex, because what constitutes ‘open research’ is perhaps much more nuanced and varied in these disciplines, and these disciplines did not always demonstrate how they were engaging with institutional priorities on open research and supporting a culture of research integrity. Overall, then, open research did not feature in the reports on most UoAs.

    It is clear that in 2021 there was progress, in part guided by the inclusion in the REF guidance of a clear indicator. However, there is still a long way to go and it is clear open research was understood and evidenced in ways that could exclude some research fields, epistemologies and transparent research practices.

    REF 2029

    With REF 2029, the new People, Culture and Environment element has created a stronger incentive to drive culture change across the sector. Institutions are embracing the move beyond compliance, making openness and transparency a core part of everyday research practice. However, alignment between this sector move, REF policy and funder action remains essential to address this collective action problem and therefore ensure that this progress is maintained.

    To step back now would not only risk slowing, or even undoing, progress, but would send confused signals that openness and transparency may be optional extras rather than essentials for a trusted research system. Embedding this move is not optional: a culture of openness is essential for the sustainability of UK research and development, for the quality of research processes, and for ensuring that outputs are not just excellent, but also trustworthy in a time of mass misinformation.

    Openness, transparency and accountability are key attributes of research, and hallmarks of the culture that we want to see in the sector now and in the future. Critically, coordinated sector-wide, institutional and individual actions are all needed to embed more openness into everyday research practices. This is not just about compliance – it is about a genuine culture shift in how research is conducted, shared and preserved. It is about doing the right thing in the right way. If that is accepted, then we would challenge those advocating for reducing the importance of those practices in the REF: what is your alternative, and will it command public trust?

     

    This article was supported by contributions from:

    Michel Belyk (Edge Hill University), Nik Bessis (Edge Hill University), Cyclia Bolibaugh (University of York), Will Cawthorn (University of Edinburgh), Joe Corneli (Oxford Brookes University), Thomas Evans (University of Greenwich), Eleanora Gandolfi (University of Surrey), Jim Grange (Keele University), Corinne Jola (Abertay University), Hamid Khan (Imperial College, London), Gemma Learmonth (University of Stirling), Natasha Mauthner (Newcastle University), Charlotte Pennington (Aston University), Etienne Roesch (University of Reading), Daniela Schmidt (University of Bristol), Suzanne Stewart (University of Chester), Richard Thomas (University of Leicester), Steven Vidovic (University of Southampton), Eric White (Oxford Brookes University).

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  • That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

    That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

    Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in. 

    You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give you good enrolment information in September. What you tend to get are what I call “mood” pieces looking backwards and forwards on long-term trends: this is particularly true in places like South Korea, where short-term trends are not bad (international students are backfilling domestic losses nicely for the moment) but the long-term looks pretty awful. Taiwan, whose demographic crisis is well known, saw a decline of about 7% in new enrolments, but there were also some shock declines in various parts of the world: Portugal, Denmark, and – most surprisingly – Pakistan. 

    Another perennial back-to-school story has to do with tuition fees. Lots of stories here. Ghana announced a new “No Fees Stress” policy in which first-year students could get their fees refunded. No doubt it’s a policy which students will enjoy, but this policy seems awfully close in inspiration to New Zealand’s First Year Free policy which famously had no effect whatsoever on access. But, elsewhere, tuition policy seems to be moving in the other direction. In China, rising fees at top universities sparked fears of an access gap and, in Iran, the decision of Islamic Azad University (a sort-of private institution that educates about a quarter of all Iranian youth) to continue raising tuition (partly in response to annual inflation rates now over 40%) has led to widespread dissatisfaction. Finally, tuition rose sharply in Bulgaria after the Higher Education Act was amended to link fees to government spending (i.e. more government spending, more fees). After student protests, the government moved to cut tuition by 25% from its new level, but this still left tuition substantially above where it was the year before.

    On the related issue of Student Aid, three countries stood out. The first was Kazakhstan, where the government increased domestic student grants increased by 61% but also announced a cut in the government’s famous study-abroad scheme which sends high-potential youth to highly-ranked foreign universities. 

    Perhaps the most stunning change occurred in Chile, where two existing student aid programs were replaced by a new system called the Fondo para la Educación Superior (FES), which is arguably unique in the world. The idea is to replace the existing system of student loans with a graduate tax: students who obtain funds through the FES will be required to pay a contribution of 10% of marginal income over about US$515/week for a period of twenty years. In substance, it is a lot like the Yale Tuition Postponement Plan, which has never been replicated at a national level because of the heavy burden placed on high income earners. A team from UCL in London analyzed the plan and suggested that it will be largely self-supporting – but only because high-earning graduates in professional fields will pay in far more than they receive, thus creating a question of potential self-selection out of the program.

    In Colombia, Congress passed a law mandating ICETEX (the country’s student loan agency which mostly services students at private universities) to lower interest rates, offer generous loan forgiveness and adopt an income-contingent repayment system. However, almost simultaneously, the Government of Gustavo Petro actually raised student loan interest rates because it could no longer afford to subsidize them. This story has a ways to run, I think.

    On to the world government cutbacks. In the Netherlands, given the fall of the Schoof government and the call for elections this month, universities might reasonably have expected to avoid trouble in a budget delivered by a caretaker government. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case: instead, the 2026 imposed significant new cuts on the sector. In Argentina, Congress passed a law that would see higher education spending rise to 1% of GDP (roughly double the current rate). President Milei vetoed the law, but Congress overturned President Milei’s veto. In theory, that means a huge increase in university funding. But given the increasing likelihood of a new economic collapse in Argentina, it’s anyone’s guess how fulfilling this law is going to work out.

    One important debate that keeps popping up in growing higher education systems is the trade-off between quality and quantity with respect to institutions: that is, to focus money on a small number of high-quality institutions or a large number of, well, mediocre ones. Back in August, the Nigerian President, under pressure from the National Assembly to open hundreds of new universities to meet growing demand, announced a seven-year moratorium on the formation of new federal universities (I will eat several articles of clothing if there are no new federal universities before 2032). Conversely, in Peru, a rambunctious Congress passed laws to create 22 new universities in the face of Presidential reluctance to spread funds too thinly. 

    The newson Graduate Outcomes is not very good, particularly in Asia. In South Korea, youth employment rates are lower than they have been in a quarter-century, and the unemployment rate among bachelor’s grads is now higher than for middle-school grads. This is leading many to delay graduation. The situation in Singapore is not quite as serious but is still bad enough to make undergraduates fight for spots in elite “business cubs”. In China, the government was sufficiently worried about the employment prospects of the spring 2025 graduating class that it ordered some unprecedented measures to find them jobs, but while youth employment stayed low (that is, about 14%) at the start of the summer, the rate was back up to 19% by August. Some think these high levels of unemployment are changing Chinese society for good. Over in North America, the situation is not quite as dire, but the sudden inability of computer science graduates to find jobs seems deeply unfair to a generation that was told “just learn how to code”. 

    Withrespect to Research Funding and Policy, the most gobsmacking news came from Switzerland where the federal government decided to slash the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. In Australia, the group handling the Government’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development released six more “issue” papers which, amongst other things, suggested forcing institutions to choose particular areas of specialization in areas of government “priority”, a suggestion which was echoed in the UK both by the new head of UK Research and Innovation and the President of Universities UK.     

    But, of course, in terms of the politicization of research, very little can match the United States. In July, President Trump issued an Executive Order which explicitly handed oversight of research grants at the many agencies which fund extramural research to political appointees who would vet projects to ensure that they were in line with Trump administration priorities. Then, on the 1st of October (technically not Q3, but it’s too big a story to omit), the White House floated the idea of a “compact” with universities, under which institutions would agree to a number of conditions including shutting down departments that “punish, belittle” or “spark violence against conservative ideas” in return for various types of funding. Descriptions of the compact from academics ranged from “rotten” to “extortion”. At the time of writing, none of the nine institutions to which this had initially been floated had given the government an answer.

    And that was the quarter that was.

     

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  • The battle for people, culture and environment

    The battle for people, culture and environment

    On the face of it, I can understand why the REF team have pressed pause on their guidance development for 2029.

    The sector is in serious financial difficulties, and while most are keen to see a greater focus on People, Culture and Environment (PCE), the challenges experienced by pilot institutions with the proposed assessment mechanism were real.

    We cannot get away from this.

    But of course, where there’s a vacuum, people will rush to fill it with their own pet peeves and theories, up to and including a full reversion to the rules of REF 2021.

    PCE and EDI

    One of the biggest fallacies being promoted is this view that PCE is what Iain Mansfield, Director of Research at the Policy Exchange Thinktank, and former Special Adviser, called “a euphemism for Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)”. This conflation of REF PCE with EDI is entirely false. In fact, the PCE pilot included five different enablers of research culture, only one of which related to inclusivity. Of the others (strategy, responsibility, connectivity, and development) two were already themes in REF 2021 Environment Statements (strategy and collaboration) so not exactly a dramatic shift in a whole new direction.

    Indeed, the Code of Practice and Environment elements of REF 2021 already placed a significant focus on EDI. Equality Impact Assessments had to be performed at every stage of the submission, EDI training for REF decision-makers was an essential requirement for even submitting to the REF, and both institution- and unit-level environment statements demanded narratives as to how equality and diversity in research careers were promoted across the institution. So anyone seeking a reversion to REF 2021 rules in order to eliminate a focus on EDI is going to be deeply disappointed.

    Perhaps the biggest disappointment about this attempt to row back on any deeper focus on research culture in the next REF is that having a thriving research culture is an integral part of any definition of research excellence, whilst being perhaps the second biggest challenge facing the sustainability of the research sector after funding. The Wellcome Trust report, and the Nuffield report that preceded it, taught us that poor incentives, highly competitive & toxic environments, precarious research careers, and unmanageable workloads, are leading to questionable research practices, increased retractions, a loss of talent and reduced trust in science. And all this at a time when we really need more talent and greater trust in science. It wasn’t that long ago that this all led to a Government R&D Culture Strategy making a clear case for better investment in research culture for the benefit of society, but still, in the recent DSIT survey of the UK Research & Development workforce, only 52 per cent of higher education respondents said the culture of their organisation enabled them to perform their best work, compared to 85 per cent in the private sector.

    The point of adding greater weight, and a clearer assessment mechanism, to a broader range of culture elements in the next REF was thus to address exactly these issues. As a reminder, the international advisory group for the next REF recommended a split of 33:33:33 for PCE, outputs and impact. Reducing the weight allocated to PCE would not only reduce the attention given to promoting positive research cultures, but actually increase the weighting allocated to the element of REF that is most responsible for driving poor research cultures: publications. We know that the publish-or-perish culture is causing significant problems across the sector. Re-calibrating the assessment to put greater weight on publications would run counter to the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment’s first commitment: to recognise the diversity of contributions to research.

    Outputs

    I do think the pause in REF is an opportunity to think about how we recognise, incentivise and reward the better research cultures we clearly need. I’ve written before about how many elements of our research culture are essentially hygiene factors and as such should not attract gold stars, but be established as a basic condition of funding. There is also an opportunity to supply culture-related data (e.g., research misconduct reporting, and research staff pay gaps) alongside the other environment data already supplied to support REF-decision making. This could be formative in and of itself, as could the use of case studies (a tested REF assessment technology) by which HEIs report on their research culture interventions.

    Whatever is decided, no-one working in a research-intensive institution can deny the power of the additional weight allocated to PCE in REF 2029. The knowledge that 25 per cent of the next exercise will be allocated to not just E, but P and C, has naturally been a lever staff have pulled to get culture issues up the agenda. And we’ve seen significant improvements: policy changes, new initiatives, and culture indicators moving in a good direction. So whilst it might feel like an easier move to simply revert back to the rules of REF 2021, there is an opportunity cost to this. A lot has already been invested in preparing institutions for a greater focus on research culture, and more will need to be invested in reverting back to the rules for REF 2021.

    Because of the REF’s direct link both to (unhypothecated) gold and (international) glory, nothing really motivates universities more. To row back on efforts to recognise, incentivise, and reward the thriving research cultures that are at the very heart of any ‘excellent’ research institution therefore makes little sense. And it makes even less sense when financial constraints are putting those environments under even more pressure, making it more important than ever that we put people first. Can we do it in a more sensitive and manageable way? Yes, of course. Should we ditch it and run for the cover of REF 2021 rules? Absolutely not.

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