A conversation with Ian Carter and Pauline Muya (Part Two)
In our first blog post, Ian Carter and Pauline Muya explored the evolving REF landscape and current sector challenges. Here in Part Two, they turn their attention to the practical realities facing institutions as they prepare for REF 2029. With financial pressures mounting and uncertainty around key elements like People, Culture and Environment (PCE), how should institutions be approaching their strategic planning? From strategic priorities to managing institutional memory, they share hard-won insights on navigating the complexities of the REF process.
Rob Johnson: I’d now like to turn our attention to practical matters – what should institutions prioritise right now to prepare for REF 2029, despite the uncertainties?
Pauline Muya: The first thing is to work out what it is that they want to achieve. Crudely, there are two strategies. One is you go for reputation and the other is you go for money.
If you’re going for reputation, then you’re looking to maximise your grade point average (GPA) and you’re perhaps a bit more selective about which outputs you select, which impact case studies you select, because it’s all about going for reputation. That could be across the board or it could be in very specific units of assessment where an institution has particular strengths.
Some institutions, given the financial situation, will sacrifice their GPA and their league table position in order to maximise their financial return. Having some idea about which of those two are the primary objective is necessary before you get into the meat of preparing the submission.
Institutions should be looking now at their impact and output pipelines to see what they have in place, what sort of quality those case studies and outputs are, because there is still time – 3½ years to submission – to actually do something about it if you identify gaps. Do that gap analysis: where have you got issues? Where are you strong? Where do you need some kind of intervention and what might that be?
Most institutions have established some form of REF governance structure, but it’s crucial to ensure this structure is properly implemented and functional. The key is having like-minded stakeholders around the table who are genuinely invested in achieving your REF objectives. It is important to start planning out what a submission looks like at quite a high level and think about what resources would be needed. Obviously, things are very tight but thinking about how to resource a REF submission in three years’ time is something that directors and PVCs need to be thinking about now.
Ian Carter: I think the advice I gave a client last year still applies. At the time the PCE pilot had not been announced, the rules were not known. They had just produced and approved a new research and innovation strategy for the institution.
My advice was to focus on delivering their own research and innovation strategy, and to adequately monitor it, capture relevant information and so on. Because if they delivered their own strategy, they’d have potentially all the material they’d need to demonstrate high performance, including in the environmental context, not just the delivery of research and innovation itself.
The rules of the game were not known, so it would be stupid to try to second-guess what you had to achieve. Institutions need to focus on delivering their own strategy and monitoring performance – if they do that adequately, they should have really good material.
This can be split up into those things you should be doing anyway – having teams that look after performance, assessment, management, looking after your staff, making sure they get chances to perform – as opposed to what are the specific things you only need to do for REF. The more you’re conscious about those elements, the better it helps with resourcing and focus.
Do not get too anxious about the rules that have not yet been published. You can speculate all you like about what they might look like, but actually only think about them when they do come out.
Pauline Muya: Part of that is also being ready when the rules come out for consultation – having a view about what does and doesn’t work in your institutional context and what the unintended consequences might be.
In environment terms, or PCE terms as it is now, institutions need to play to their own strengths and not all try to be Oxfords and Cambridges. Some of the clients I worked with in the last exercise – it was about “tell your story, don’t try and be a different type of institution. What is it that university X does really well? What are you known for? What do you stand out for?” Because that’s how you’re going to tell a good story about environment and score well, because the panels will see that you’re playing a key role in your city or region.
Too often the newer entrants try to be like the big players, and they don’t succeed because they just don’t have that infrastructure and level of resource. They need to be authentic.
Ian Carter: I completely agree. Smaller institutions often can provide a better, more personalised environment for postgraduate research students or postdocs, because there are fewer of them to look after, rather than being a lower resourced environment in absolute terms.
Rob Johnson: One of the things that is known is that HESA data will be used to calculate REF 2029 volume measures. What are the implications of that for institutions?
Ian Carter: Institutions need to have a better handle on their data and better integration. I’ve long argued for this because I could see it in both staff data and postgraduate research (PGR) student data that the mechanisms institutions were using were very siloed. HR or planning was responsible for staff data submission, and they had no real understanding how it was or could be used in research.
If you want to manage research, you need to understand the people you’ve got. It’s much more important than understanding the grants. We have grants systems, but we really didn’t have research people systems until more recent years in some places. This disconnect within the institution is a false one.
The averaging out over the longer term – only a couple of years for this exercise, but subsequent ones will be the whole census period – should make the process easier (as it is business as usual) and less of a time crunch for institutions compared to a single point submission and calculation on the census date.
Pauline Muya: It also moves away from the transfer market that’s always been there, where some institutions that have had money have brought in 20 new people in the run-up to the REF submission and they’re gone three months after REF has been submitted. That kind of scheme becomes less possible.
They have clarified that submissions don’t necessarily have to go to the cost centres that people have been allocated in the HESA return, which may not be an issue for larger institutions. But for smaller institutions, they may have various cost centres for teaching purposes but may only be able to make five or six unit of assessment (UoA) submissions, so having that flexibility confirmed is really important so they can draw together groupings in as natural a way as possible.
Rob Johnson: What about the inevitable loss of institutional memory – seven or eight years is a long time. How can institutions mitigate that risk?
Ian Carter: It’s a really important question, but quite difficult to answer. You could use professional networks to gather insights, but you need to be able separate experience from speculation. Equally, we all have some naive questions, so do not be afraid to ask.
The potential network within the institution is also worth recognising – the leadership might have changed, but there would have been people who were involved in some shape or form, both academic and professional staff. Try to maintain that and draw on it. It might be part of the succession planning that institutions need to build in more successfully. The PVC who might be the leader could well have been involved at unit level previously, for example; IT staff, always crucial, may be the same.
Pauline Muya: The ARMA networks and other networks are important and are a really supportive space for people to learn from others. Across the institution, there’s often people who have been involved – sometimes PVCs do their stint and go off somewhere else. But if the institution didn’t perform particularly well, they may not want to give their pearls of wisdom because they may have had criticism during the inevitable inquiry once the results were released.
The logistical questions are around the records that are kept – that the Teams site doesn’t vanish as soon as somebody leaves. We have a terrible tendency in the sector to go back to ground zero and not look at and learn from what worked well previously at an institution.
Many institutions will have former panel members who, whilst they can’t divulge the confidential nature of discussions, can give insights and are often leaned on by PVCs and vice chancellors. If I’m being slightly controversial, the REF team at Research England also suffer from that challenge because they’re disbanded and reformed at every exercise, so continuity and corporate memory can be lost.
Ian Carter: There’s a separation of different aspects of corporate knowledge. One is about the strategic approach – how do you shape a submission – versus the operational and the data which rests in other people’s heads. You need separate, but connected, approaches to both bits.
Rob Johnson: When approaching questions about which units of assessment to submit to, what should institutions consider?
Ian Carter: It is about trying to bet the best fit of the research to the criteria – you want to have your research assessed by the most appropriate panel. Read the criteria really carefully. Look at panel members and their backgrounds. It’s not to try to avoid critics of your research, but who understands your research specialisms. Take the opportunity to identify your areas of strength as part of the survey of submission intentions, to try to make sure that panel members with relevant expertise are added to your chosen unit of assessment.
Pauline Muya: I’ve always seen the submission process as a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. Looking at units holistically is really important because you could have fantastic outputs but no impact, or the environment is not what it could be. Think about all three elements of the submission and how you can paint the institution in the strongest possible light.
The UoA descriptors don’t normally change radically from one exercise to another. We’ve got the ones from 2021, we’ve kept the same sub-panel structure, so broadly we know what the remits of the different panels will be. There will be some areas within any institution where it’s a sure-fire “we’re going to go into that unit of assessment.” But there may be others around the edges where you could go into one or more units and a decision about best fit needs to be made.
Being able to do that modelling and mapping – which are the sure-fire ones we’re definitely going into and where are the wider pool of potentials? Start working through some of those. What does our submission look like? Did we put too many in last time? Have we got it about right? All of that starts to fill the jigsaw puzzle.
Rob Johnson: What are the key factors in managing a successful REF submission overall – governance, strategy, systems, communications, resourcing?
Pauline Muya: All of it!
Ian Carter: I agree with Pauline- all of those plus level-headedness.
Pauline Muya: Pragmatism. Thick skin.
Rob Johnson: How do you keep up people’s morale through the inevitable mini-crises in the run-up to submissions?
Pauline Muya: Just thinking back to the last two institutions – when I was at the Institute of Education, I was doing that alongside an institutional merger, so that wasn’t difficult at all! But working with the team, getting alongside them and working with the unit assessment leads, having clear messaging.
When I was at Leicester, we had messaging about “this is institutionally driven, these are not decisions taken by individual academics.” Having the backing of senior management that what we were doing was the right thing. Yes, it was pressured and high stakes and no one wanted to get it wrong, but applauding the good work that the team were doing.
When the results came out, everyone that had been involved in the submission at Leicester was delighted because they’d done really well. Being clear about what we were trying to achieve and how we were going to do it, having a plan and sticking to that plan. There were ebbs and flows within the team inevitably, but that’s part of leadership and running a team.
Ian Carter: It’s a multi-year institutional-level project and you need to think about it in that context and manage it as such with all the risk management one does in a large-scale, multi-part project. Communication is key – not just broad-scale communication, but making time to spend with individuals at whatever level, from the most senior to the most junior, explaining what it’s about. Spending time with your HR staff, with IT, with department administrators, reassuring them, helping them to trust that what you’re saying is correct. It is a people management, project management task. Very technical, but it’s people-based.
Rob Johnson: Any final thoughts for institutions feeling overwhelmed by the REF 2029 process?
Pauline Muya: For people coming into it, it can feel quite daunting and overwhelming because it’s high stakes, high reputation and there’s a lot of work involved. But actually once you get into it, there’s so many people that you work with across the institution. If you are a REF manager looking to build your career, it’s a fantastic opportunity to be quite high profile in an institution.
Almost all people who have done secretariat roles have gone on to promotions in the two years following REF 2021. It is hard work, but it enables us to show the fantastic research that is done within our institutions. There must be a reason why I’m on my sixth one – you kind of get into it and enjoy it in a bizarre kind of way.
We can take real pride in the research that happens in UK higher education and that’s what the REF shows – the wonderful research that happens.
Ian Carter: Don’t panic. There’s time to do stuff. You don’t need to have it all in place right away. Focus on delivering your own strategy and monitoring performance adequately. If you do that, you should have really good material for when the point of submission comes.
To find out more about how we can support your preparations for REF, visit our dedicated site https://www.ref-ready.com/ or contact us at enquiries@research-consulting.com
