Assessment, selectivity and excellence: getting the balance right

Sir Howard Newby

1986 and all that…………

• A reminder of the RAE’s origins:

– expanding student numbers without commensurate increase in research funding

– ensuring that resources followed performance

– selectivity Vs concentration

– the importance of dual support

Driving excellence

• The key issue is that funding should incentivise research excellence

• Everything else is a second order issue as to how this is best achieved

• HEFCE’s policy has been robust on the former, whilst having an open mind on the latter

Advantages of the RAE

• Benchmarking of performance

• Driven research excellence and banished much mediocrity

• Led to the active management of the research base in HEIs

• Raised research standards and efficiency

• Sustained the UK’s position in the global research economy

Disadvantages of the RAE

• Encouraged an over-emphasis on research at the expense of other HEI functions

• Encouraged a restricted range of research outputs

• Created a ceiling effect for the top rated units

• Encouraged the perpetuation of disciplinarity

The RAE and wider HE policies

• Selectivity Vs concentration

• Research, knowledge transfer and learning and teaching inter-related

• Huge incentives for research Vs virtually none elsewhere

• What are the incentives for excellence in non research-led HEIs?

Metrics alone are not enough

• Metrics will not remove distortions and game-playing, merely provide different ones

• The danger is that spurious focus on metrics will perpetuate the absence of clear thinking on wider policy issues

• A wider range of incentives is needed to ensure an appropriate functional differentiation of the sector in the future

Winners and Losers

• Running a beauty competition on metrics based models is no substitute for policy

• Babies and bathwater………