Quality-related research funding should be distributed in England on the basis of the size of a university¡¯s research workforce, not its performance in the research excellence framework, according to a leading academic.

Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, said that it was ¡°time for a?rethink¡± on the way QR funding is allocated and, in particular, on the role of the REF, which ¡°wastes time and generates bad incentives¡±.

Professor Bishop said that analysis of the last REF showed that if you ¡°dispense with the review of quality, you can obtain similar outcomes by allocating funding at institutional level in relation to research volume¡±.

The government should, therefore, consider allocating block funding in proportion to the number of research-active staff at a university because that would shrink the burden on universities and reduce perverse incentives in the system, she said.

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Quality-related funding is distributed in the UK based on the proportion of research at an institution that is rated as 4* (world-leading), 3* (internationally excellent) and so on. But, giving a lecture organised by the Council for the Defence of British Universities, Professor Bishop said that the REF was having a ¡°negative effect on the UK¡¯s research culture¡± because it encouraged academics to favour speed over careful scholarship and pushed universities to base hiring decisions on how ¡°REF-able¡± a scholar is.

As a result, UK research is ¡°not getting better but getting worse¡±, she said.

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The original goal of the REF¡¯s predecessor, the research assessment exercise, was to provide a means of distributing funds transparently, but subsequent attempts to ¡°tweak¡± the process had simply resulted in more problems within the system, Professor Bishop continued.

For example, the change of the relative weighting given to 4* and 3* research in the funding formula from 3:1 to 4:1 after the last REF simply entrenched the advantage enjoyed by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and leading London institutions, Professor Bishop argued.

¡°The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,¡± she said. ¡°And any formula that did not put Oxford, Cambridge and London at the top would be unacceptable.¡±

Professor Bishop said that the government should stop trying to design ¡°perfect, comprehensive evaluation systems¡± because achieving that ideal was not realistic. Instead, it needed to weigh the benefits of the current excellence evaluations against the costs of an inevitably incomplete and imperfect system.

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However, Professor Bishop reserved her harshest criticisms for the more recently introduced teaching excellence framework. Although the REF was ¡°not an unmitigated evil, the TEF should be strangled at birth¡±, she said.

Rather than trying to measure teaching standards via proxies such as scores in the National Student Survey, Professor Bishop argued that English institutions should revert to a system under which ¡°the rare failures of teaching are dealt with by the [Quality Assurance Agency]¡±.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com