The Productivity Commission -- the Minister for Education, Science and Training -- and the Research Quality Framework. (November 22, 2006)

    The Research Quality Framework has become a rather unfunny running gag with its being touted by the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, as being the mechanism that will be "an important reform for Australian research as it will boost the production of high quality and high impact research and will give Australian researchers greater capacity to compete on the international stage."

Perhaps sequestered in her desk there's a stone tablet where it's written because she made the evaluation despite her Development Advisory Group having left significant matters unfinished , i.e. "work to develop Guidelines [is to] commence in late 2006. In addition, the Chairs of the Assessment Panels [are to] be recruited to assist in the development of panel-specific Guidelines and in the conduct of pre-implementation trials. [And] a draft of overarching Guidelines for the RQF [must] be developed for discipline workshops, planned for early 2007, to develop the panel-specific sections of draft RQF Guidelines. These workshops will build on the preliminary scoping workshop held in February 2006."

The  science policy spokesman for the Australian Academy of Science, Professor Philip Kuchel said, "The recommended RQF remains short on detail on the relative funding
that will flow to the nation's top researchers, as assessed by quality and impact ratings."

No doubt pearls of wisdom will drop from Ms Bishops lips some time soon.

As TFW noted on November 15 the Productivity Commission recommended that implementation of the RQF be delayed, with more preliminary trials run while also exploring options other than the RQF. It made the additional point that the current block grant funding mechanism was by and large working quite well, though additional tweaking was certainly worth investigating.

When challenged about her ignoring the commission's draft report Ms Bishop replied "My understanding is that the Productivity Commission report predates the final advice of the RQF Development Advisory Group. So I took into account the Productivity Commission's view but, given that we were far more advanced than they would have been aware, I felt that the department would have been able to work with them in the lead-up to their final report."

It would appear that Professor Kuchel, speaking for the Academy, doesn't think that they are all that "far advanced". That it's a case of "sentence first -- verdict afterwards", considering what the RQFDAG has left to be done, would seem to be stating the bleedin' obvious.

Now the Chief Scientist, Jim Peacock, the chairman of the RQFDAG screwed up his courage and wrote in the Chairman's Forward, "The Advisory Group strongly recommends that if the Australian Government agrees to implement the RQF, the overall block grant envelope should be increased to reward high quality and high impact research. This would be an effective mechanism to encourage research of high quality and relevance and to drive increased investment in research by business and the wider community."

According to The Australian's Dorothy Illing:

Ms Bishop said there would be money for implementation costs. And the Government would revisit the funding issue after two years, once the impact of the RQF on present arrangements became apparent.

"At the end of 2008 we'll see whether there's a need for a safety net, some smoothing, some transitional funding. We'll see."

Ms Bishop said a "whole range of issues" would arise during the first [six year] cycle: indeed "aberrant behaviour" had arisen under the existing system.

"Some of these things happen, but I think overall the research quality framework will allow universities to better direct their research efforts and I don't see that as having an impact on teaching."

She said the overseas experiences were useful but "we're striking out on our own path", taking into account the circumstances of Australian universities and their research history.

It might be unwise for the tertiary education sector to count to heavily on that revisiting providing additional resources.

You may recall Ms Bishop's predecessor, Brendon Nelson, promising to examine indexing of university block funding if his higher education reform bill was past by the Senate. He did indeed have a governmental committee look at the matter, and low and behold it found no change was required.

Now we come to a matter which has gone unmentioned by Ms Bishop and is not refered to by the RQFDAG.

According to the Productivity Commission's draft report, 30% of the block grant of $600 million that is dispensed to the universities is used to fund on-costs for Australian Research Council grants, and although it is not stated in the draft report a spokesperson told TFW that he believed a similar sum was allocated for National Health and Medical Research Council Grants. The matter of insufficient provision for on-costs in ARC and NHMRC grants as compared with the system operating in the US has long been a bone of contention between the universities and the federal government. There would seem reason to believe that what may transpire with the implementation of an RQF is an exacerbation of the problem. Whether or not this is deliberate on the part of the federal government is a moot point. Certainly the ability of universities to make decisions in-house as to funding young researchers it considered worth giving initial support will be much reduced.

Oh, did someone mention "Guidelines".

Well actually no, the matter remained unvisited by theQueen of Hearts.