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Universities: Research Funding

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Sharp for introducing this important debate and for her clear and passionate analysis of the inconsistencies in the funding of research. It has been a most interesting debate. I come to this from the point of view of the students. I believe that students in all universities are entitled to expect research-informed teaching, to be informed by the latest thinking in their field of study and taught to develop for themselves skills of critical inquiry and reflection as part of their higher education study. To me that is the crucial difference between teaching in universities and schools—and in that I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester. But they will not get this unless all institutions providing higher education courses leading to degrees get funding from somewhere to do research. We have heard this evening about the various problems with the funding for that. We should also value and reward high quality teaching. That is one of the very important areas of excellence that all universities and colleges should develop. I think that we are all agreed that research underpins all that—even the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, in a contribution that he himself described as ““stark””. It is significant that the inflationary uplift for research funding has been greater than that provided for teaching. Is that an indication of the relative importance attributed to each or recognition of the fact that we must have research if we are to have good teaching? As we have heard, quality-related funding is supposed to be for supporting research infrastructure and postgraduate teaching in all universities, but actually it ends up boosting facilities in the few top research-intensive universities, leaving many without anything. We have also heard from academics how the peer-review part of the RAE is a time-consuming mammoth which needs urgent review and refinement and the role that metrics, or measurable outcomes, should have. While we wait for this review—I believe until 2014 for its full implementation—the Government’s two sticking-plaster responses have not solved the problem. The Research Capability Fund introduced in 2003 was, at £22.1 million last year, pretty small in relation to the total £1.3 billion allocated under QR. It was aimed at supporting research in emerging subject areas where research is scarce and there are few existing projects for assessment, such as art and design, communication, media, dancing, drama, nursing, social work and sports studies. That is not a lot of money to go round all those subject areas. Secondly, the £75 million time-limited core funding which came from HEFCE in January to support physics, chemistry, engineering and metallurgy departments that were in danger of closing down was also not very much when spread around to those who needed it—not even enough per student to keep a ““well-found laboratory”” going. These departments will have to survive on this until the various initiatives about which we heard in our debate last week on science teaching have the desired effect in creating more demand from new students from schools. There are many problems with the QR. Naturally, vice-chancellors of research-intensive universities rated five and five starred like it because they benefit from massive influxes of funds. However, it now provides nothing for those universities rated lower than four, even though some of their research may be of national significance, and it has a very strong effect on their teaching. Many universities finding themselves in this situation manage to raise large amounts of research funding from the private sector, but as my noble friend Lady Sharp said there is no doubt that winning QR money actually levers in more from the private sector, so those that do not get it feel a double whammy. I come back to the importance of the quality of teaching. Is the whole notion of the ““well-found laboratory”” to be ditched? Does the Minister agree about the importance of having undergraduates as well as graduates taught by research-active staff? Is the infrastructure support for teaching now to be subsumed under the Science Research Investment Fund? SRIF has made a big difference but cannot be fully replaced by the ““endangered species”” funding. As my noble friend said, we do not even know whether that is to be continued anyway after the initial announcement. Much of the debate about the future of the RAE has been about the pros and cons of metrics but the issue of fair distribution across the universities has been neglected. That can be disastrous, as the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, mentioned in relation to dental schools.