Research Excellence Framework

I haven't got that much news because it's...

the news has been taken over by all of these political things, and y- I have to ration that really for the maternity, yeah.

So we're, we're having a really delicious research feel this evening, and it's so nice because, uh, actually the other thing is, I have to say, the Research Excellence Frameworks, now this will be familiar to some of you who know about research.

There's a big thing about, um, fund- research funding and kind of prestige for different universities.

Now, one of our... its 34 sub-panels has been renamed, and midwifery is actually named.

Um, we, the only space we can get money from government now in universities is for our research, and the money that we get for our research is incredibly competitive.

Um, some of it is awarded through, um, the REF, the Research Excellence Framework, which is the thing which is, which kind of ranks universities on their research in different topics.

We get something called QS funding that comes from that, where the people who are more highly ranked get more research money from the government.

But increasingly, research money is also kind of competitive, and it comes through the research councils like, for history, the Arts and Humanities Research Coun- Council or the NERC or the, um, EHRC.

And there's a sense of always falling short.

We have the system like the REF, the Research Excellence Framework, where people are kind of being assessed, even though there are no changes to it in terms of exactly what is being assessed.

But the...

there is this sense of inherent competitiveness to academia.

I, I feel I should unpack the KEF and the REF because it sounds like we, we work in three-letter acronyms.

So, so we have an exercise in the UK called the Research Excellence Framework, which is a kind of like how, how, what's the quality of research going on? And a key part of that is impact.

A key part of that is what impact is that research having through a variety of forms of knowledge exchange.

And then we also have something called the KEF, which is the Knowledge Exchange Framework, uh, which is a mechanism by which we can, um, uh, measure and demonstrate, um, the impact that universities are having through this.