Who is getting what from Research England next year?
James Coe is Associate Editor for research and innovation at Wonkhe, and a partner at Counterculture
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Before we get to next year let’s first look at where Research England’s budgets are up to.
Back in July 2022 Research England set out its budgets up to 2025. In short, it was announced that total research funding would grow from £1.95bn in 2021/22 to £2.13bn by 2023/24. QR funding would grow from £1.79bn to £1.97bn over the same period with a contemporaneous 36 per cent increase in the business research element of funding.
The good news is that Research England has been able to honour these commitments. Earlier in the year DSIT sent out a letter that they expected the funding to be spent on all sorts of good things like working with business and funding research excellence.
QR funding is tied closely to REF. As the mechanism for distributing mainstream QR funding has remained consistent this means that any change in funding allocation between REF exercises is, broadly, due to a change in research performance. The likes of The University of Northumbria, by 146 per cent, and Teesside University, by 75.7 per cent, were able to grow their QR allocation because more of their research was judged as world-leading and internationally excellent.
Therefore, as Research England’s budgets have remained stable and REF results have now flushed through the funding formulae the funding allocations are relatively predictable.
Given their REF results, volume of outputs, and knowledge exchange activity, there aren’t any enormous surprises in seeing the University of Oxford, UCL, and the University of Cambridge, top the recurrent funding distributions.
The results are impressive but they are not particularly surprising. They are demonstrative that despite the letter from DSIT QR funding is not a tool for levelling up. QR follows excellence wherever it may be and any ancillary benefits it has in redistributing research funding across the country is a product of university research performance rather than the design of funding.
The way funding is hypothecated also leads to compound benefits. The University of Oxford does world-leading research which in turn means it gets more funding which in turn means it can do more world-leading research. Again, this is entirely reasonable and a deliberate consequence of the policy design, but QR is also not about radically reshaping the funding landscape.
The change to university formula-based funding between 2022/23-2023/24 is therefore also pretty consistent.
As is apparent in the modest movement in recurrent funding between 2022/23 -2023/24 the recurrent funding settlements are mostly, well, settled. The most significant movements at either end of the scale are likely due to change in provider activity. This may be volume of activity, changing business engagement, or the phasing out of supplementary QR funding following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Recurrent funding is predictable and where there is lots of unpredictability in the wider research landscape this isn’t a bad thing.