ed-25_03

Gareth Roberts -- The RAE -- The RQF -- and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Brown

Donald MacLeod
Wednesday March 22, 2006

A unique British institution was sentenced to the axe this afternoon - though few in the Commons or outside realised it from Gordon Brown's rapid-fire delivery.

The research assessment exercise (RAE) - a gargantuan exercise in which every active researcher in every university in the UK is painstakingly assessed by panels of other academics - is to go.

And while Gordon Brown was administrating the coup de grace to the RAE, Gareth Roberts*, Chairman of what was the Expert Advisory Group advising the then Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, on the preferred model for an Australian Research Quality Framework (antipodean RAE) was addressing The Australian Financial Review's higher education summit and told them Australia should boost public spending on research as it introduces its RQF.

Professor Roberts pointed out out that the United Kingdom's investment in research had increased by a factor of three since 1997, as research performance improved. However, he did not discuss what part of the improvement was the result of the RAE per se, clearly a matter exercising Mr Brown.

Professor Roberts went on to ask, "When is [Australian Treasurer Peter] Costello going to speak about research in his budget address? The implementation of the RQF should be accompanied by a significant increase in block funding allocation as an outcome of the process."

It would be ill advised for Sir Gareth told hold his breath waiting. The Prime Minister, John Howard, made it quite clear last year that with the allocations made in Backing Australia's Ability II he was not prepared to countenance any whinging from the nation's research community, while the Treasurer's distain for support for research is legion.

The Australian National University's Vice-Chancellor, Ian Chubb, told the AFR's higher education summit, "The effect of this exercise [the RQF} has got to be to increase Australia's capacity - not just to redistribute existing capacity. It's a costly, wrenching . . . and potentially destructive exercise if there is no increase in capacity."

After two decades of the RAE, the UK Labour Government has finally got the message that despite repeated tinkering it's at best of questionable value.

Now according to The Guardian the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man of numbers, is putting forward the approach that "The next RAE in 2008 will be the last as part of the chancellor's attempt to 'radically simplify' the method of distributing research funding to universities. In fact, if universities can agree on a replacement, the 2008 RAE does not have to happen at all, in Mr Brown's view. In future, money will be distributed on the basis of 'metrics', such as the impact of published papers or the amount of income earned in research grants and contracts."

The RAE has made funding very selective - as it was intended to do - and concentrates research money on a university elite. But it is also a burden on academics - though vice-chancellors rather like it because it gives them more control over their academic staff.

Furthermore, as Peter Hall pointed out in his letter to the Australian Financial Review earlier this week, "A major worry is the reduction in research diversity to which the RQF will probably lead. In an era where frontier fields of science are becoming highly multidisciplinary, reduced diversity is bound to have negative consequences. Achieving diversity is a significant problem in a small scientific enterprise, like Australia's. Being small doesn't mean we don't need to cover the same research bases as a larger nation; for example, when we bring together different disciplines to model salinity and climate change, or to work on problems in genomics."

A statement released by the UK Treasury following Mr Brown's speech to the House reads:

Baroness Warwick, the chief executive of Universities UK (UKK), which represents vice-chancellors, told The Guardian that while the vice-chancellors had, "an open mind" as to what should happen after the next RAE she warned, "We would not want to see the abolition of the RAE without a viable alternative, which has the full confidence of the academic community, to replace it. It will be important that we have a full debate on alternatives to the current RAE and the greater use of metrics, and that the government work closely with the sector as this process develops. UUK looks forward to being fully involved."

The UK Labour Government has announced the formation of a working group to develop the successor to the RAE.

According to The Guardian, "The group will be jointly chaired by David Eastwood, the acting chief executive of the funding council for England, Hefce [Higher Education Funding Council for England] , and Sir Alan Wilson, the director general for higher education at the Department for Education and Skills, [and] will include representatives from the funding councils for Scotland and Wales, the Department for Employment and Learning in Northern Ireland, the Treasury and the Office of Science and Technology."

And addressing the concerns of Universities UK, the higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said, "The working group I am announcing will help us develop a simpler and less burdensome system of allocation. We will be working closely with the UK higher education sector to ensure that a new system meets their needs."

The shadow higher education spokesman, Boris Johnson, told The Guardian it was "high time" the RAE was reformed. "Whatever the government puts in its place must allow universities to get on with serious research without pointless form-filling and the production of mountains of academically worthless papers."

One of the matters that must be considered when committing resources to research is the time lag between when research is undertaken and then reported and the garnering of the metrics derived from the work. An obvious potential shortcoming is the handicap young researchers can be placed under as well as developing interdisciplinary research projects. To that end "a shadow" metrics exercise will run alongside the next panel review in two years", but no details of its brief have been announced.

Nevertheless what ought to be clear is that on the one hand repeated governmental modifications of the RAE have not overcome the intrinsic shortcomings of the approach while on the other there have been no convincing data presented that of itself it was of significance for improving the quality and quantity of UK research.

Appointed to serve on the Higher Education Funding Council for England Board from August 1997 for three years he was reappointed in 2000 and 2002 until August 2005. He chaired the Board’s Research Committee through August 2005 and led the UK-wide review of research assessment, which reported to the UK funding bodies in 2003. Sir Gareth was formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield and in 2001 became the President of Wolfson College, Oxford.