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Universities: Research Assessment Exercise

My Lords, the House is indebted to my noble friend Lord Williams for raising this important subject. It is a particular pleasure to begin by congratulating the Astronomer Royal, the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, on his excellent and authoritative maiden speech. I am told that one of his main current research interests—when he has time off from being Master of Trinity College, Cambridge—is cosmic structure formation, especially the early generations of galaxies formed at the end of the cosmic dark age. That sounds to me like an excellent basis for understanding the genesis of the research assessment exercise and the metrics system that might replace it. I am glad to say that Britain’s universities are in anything but a dark age, cosmic or otherwise. In fact, our universities have never been more internationally respected and successful. A good part of the reason for that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, made clear, is their immense research strengths, as demonstrated and encouraged by the research assessment exercise. Since 1986, the RAE has demonstrated conclusively that most taxpayer-funded research is truly world-class and in terms of quality stands second only to that produced by the vastly larger higher education system of the United States. All speakers in the debate have recognised the importance of the RAE in driving up standards, even if it has deprived my noble friend Lord Desai of a good part of his summer holidays. Successive reputable international studies have also demonstrated this, most recently those conducted in China, by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and in Spain by Webometrics. On that basis, I enter my noble friend Lord Gidden’s quiz with the boring, but I think essentially accurate, entry that RAE stands for ““realising academic excellence””. Between the last two RAEs, in 1996 and 2001, the number of university departments achieving the top five or five-star ratings rose by 65 per cent to over 800. Those excellent departments now employ more than half of the researchers in the higher education system. The London School of Economics is particularly well represented in today’s debate, as it always is on university matters in your Lordships’ House. My noble friends Lord Williams, Lord Desai and Lord Giddens have all played an important part in its recent history, so I am glad to note that the number of five-star departments at the LSE rose from four in 1996 to seven in 2001, but many other universities have a good story to tell as well. Noble Lords have noted in the debate that the RAE has changed and improved every time that it has been conducted. For the next exercise in 2008, the financial cliff edges—the difference between, say, a ranking of four and a ranking of five, which my noble friend Lord Williams mentioned—will be modified by the introduction of institutional quality profiles of the sort recommended in Sir Gareth Roberts’s 2003 review. There will also be fewer peer review panels in 2008 than there were in 2001 and greater recognition of previously undervalued activities, notably applied research. As the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, rightly emphasised, there are strong arguments in favour of a separate funding stream for applied research, and that is why the Government established the Higher Education Innovation Fund. I can assure the noble Lord that the Government will be exploring this important issue further in the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review. My noble friend Lord Williams suggested that the RAE had penalised laboratory-based subjects. We do not believe that to be the case. The formula according to which the funding bodies allocate money has always been heavily weighted in favour of the hard sciences, in recognition of the higher cost of those subjects. However, the Government are in no way complacent about the RAE. My noble friend Lord Williams is the distinguished biographer of the most famous French president of the last century, Charles de Gaulle. I hope that he will permit me to answer his question—is the operation of the RAE satisfactory?—by quoting another French president, Valery Giscard-d’Estaing and using his famous formula, ““Yes, but””. Yes, the RAE has been a broad success, but there are issues about its future that it is right to discuss and to address. The first is the cost. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) estimates the total cost of the RAE at more than £50 million, but on other estimates it could be higher still, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, and the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, said. In context, £50 million is less than 1 per cent of the total value of the research budget whose allocation the RAE informs, but £50 million is £50 million, and most of that cost is borne by universities in staff and administrative time rather than by HEFCE. It is absolutely legitimate that we see how we can reduce that sum. The second issue is bureaucracy, about which the noble Lord, Lord Williams, made much in his remarks. We need to be clear about what we mean by bureaucracy. The quality of the assessment exercise itself in the RAE is almost universally acknowledged. As Sir Gareth Roberts put it:"““The confidence and the consent of the academic community is one based ultimately upon expert peer review””." Peer review is at the heart of the RAE. However, it cannot be denied that the RAE involves a lot of what I might term academic bureaucracy. It involves 82 peer review panels, supported by 800 pages of guidance and many times more than that in university submissions. This again is an issue for legitimate consideration with regard to the future of the RAE, although as the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, rightly mentions, the cost of administering research council grants is also significant. That needs to be taken into account. A third issue often raised is that the RAE is divisive. The Government have much less sympathy with that view. As my noble friend Lord Desai said, research selectivity must, of necessity, be selective and tough. If it were not selective, we would not be fostering and rewarding excellence. I believe that all noble Lords would agree that that should be our objective in allocating most research funding. Research excellence is emphatically not the only game in town to enable universities to develop their mission. Many universities have successfully developed or, as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, always had from the outset alternative missions and alternative sources of funding, whether through promoting access, through excellence in teaching or, increasingly, through interaction with business and the community. That is as it should be, as we foster a diverse education system that meets the full range of social, economic and academic demands to which higher education can legitimately respond. The research funding whose distribution the RAE informs is allocated entirely at the discretion of the universities that receive it. Universities are as free to spend quality-related research funding on a department that has performed badly in the RAE or on an entirely new form of activity as on one that has performed well. They make their own strategic decisions. However, I would mention one further benefit of the RAE. The RAE has been useful not only in distinguishing between universities but also within universities, helping faculty and university leaders to distinguish productive from unproductive researchers and to distinguish research-intensive from research-inactive departments. That information has been an important management tool for vice-chancellors, whose management decisions and strategic planning now usually take research quality into account. In my experience, vice-chancellors do not trumpet from the rooftops that particular benefit to them of the RAE, but they are generally happy to acknowledge it in private, including to Ministers, I might add. Can I address briefly the issue of ““game-playing”” that my noble friend Lord Williams raised? I do not believe it to be a phenomenon that began with the RAE. It will certainly not end with it. Leading research universities have always sought to attract the best researchers, and comparatively few academics have remained in one institution for their entire career. Likewise, universities have also always sought talent from overseas. Wittgenstein and many others were not recruited by Cambridge in the 1930s because of the RAE, but because Cambridge, then as now, wanted the brightest and the best. We are weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the RAE. Like the universities themselves, we worry about the bureaucracy of the RAE and wonder whether a simpler system is possible. The challenge is to achieve that while upholding the principle of the dual support system for research, with some funding for specific projects coming through the research councils and the rest coming from the funding councils to encourage and reward overall excellent research performance. As noble Lords have noted, last week my right honourable friend the Chancellor announced the imminent launch of consultation on a metrics-based research assessment system to be tested in parallel with the 2008 RAE. Our expectation in doing so is that, after the RAE, the system for assessing research quality and allocating quality-related funding will be mainly metrics-based. My right honourable friend also set out the broad parameters of what a metrics system might look like. That is an important step forward in realising a commitment to explore metrics first given in the 2004 science and innovation investment framework. Metrics are what most of us would simply call ““statistics””, such as research income, numbers of researchers, volume of publications, citations and so forth. The potential merits of this approach are transparency and reduced bureaucracy, avoiding the need to bring together panels of academics—at least, on anything like the scale that we do at the moment. The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, rightly cautioned us to be very careful before we leap in this respect. No one has more experience than the noble Lord in preparing the ground for substantial public policy shifts, and he speaks with great wisdom in these matters. I should emphasise that our consultation proposals for the metrics system are being drawn up carefully by a group led by Sir Alan Wilson, the director-general for higher education in my department, in conjunction with Professor David Eastwood, the chief executive-designate of HEFCE. The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and its counterparts in Scotland and Northern Ireland are collaborating closely. A particularly important issue for the review to consider is how the arts, humanities and social sciences will be catered for in a new system. In view of the front page of today’s Times Higher Education Supplement, I should also stress that the Treasury will be represented on the working group. My department has been working closely with both the Treasury and the Office of Science and Technology ever since our joint commitment to shadow RAE 2008 with a metrics exercise was first made in 2004. Questions have been raised about the likely distributional consequences of a metrics-based system as against the status quo. I can assure the House that we will model this carefully once we have a firm metrics proposal from the working group, and the data will be published. Full consultation proposals will be published in May and final decisions will be announced before the end of the year. Our objective in setting out proposals for the future will be simple: to continue to further the research excellence and dynamism that the RAE has encouraged over the past two decades. However, as we made clear in the Budget documentation, and I reiterate today, a new metrics-based system will replace, as opposed to succeed, the 2008 RAE only if there is a broad consensus for that in the consultation process which is about to begin. In conclusion, the Government are aware both of the benefits of the RAE and of its shortcomings. In seeking to develop a new system, we are conscious of the imperative to act with the confidence of our universities. As we do so, we will reinforce Britain’s international research pre-eminence and, I believe, give universities greater freedom to meet the challenges of international competition.