This survey is being undertaken by the four UK Higher Education Funding Bodies (Research England, the Scottish Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland) as part of the
Future Research Assessment Programme (FRAP). FRAP aims to explore possible approaches to the assessment of UK higher education research performance. As part of this work, the funding bodies seek to understand the impact of the current assessment exercise, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 on the research community. The REF is not an assessment of individuals; however, the funding bodies wish to understand how unit-level assessment impacts individual researchers.
A commissioned report, ‘
Understanding perceptions of the Research Excellence Framework among UK researchers’, published on 24/11/21, has gathered evidence of attitudes to the REF in real time as institutions were preparing their submissions to the exercise. The purpose of this survey is to understand the extent to which the views identified in the report are representative of the wider UK research community.
You are asked to base your responses on your own personal experiences of REF 2021, rather than your wider perceptions of the impact of the REF. Where a question is not relevant to your own experiences, please respond ‘N/A’ or ‘Don’t know’, as appropriate.
Responses to this consultation are invited from any individuals with an interest in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. Only responses received through the online form will be reviewed and included in our analysis. All responses made through the online form by the deadline will be considered. The survey will remain open until
noon on 26 January 2022. Following the deadline, the FRAP team at Research England will copy responses to the UK Higher Education Funding Bodies. All views expressed will be taken into account alongside multiple other forms of evidence and analysis when considering the future of UK-wide research assessment. We will publish an analysis of the survey responses and an explanation of how they were used in our subsequent decisions. Equalities data will be published as anonymous aggregated data. Personal information (name and email) is being collected to mitigate against multiple submissions by one individual. This information will not be used to links responses or equalities information to individuals and will be destroyed before analysis begins. Additionally, all responses may be disclosed on request, under the terms of the relevant Freedom of Information Acts across the UK. The Acts give a public right of access to any information held by a public authority, in this case the four UK funding bodies. This includes information provided in response to a survey. We have a responsibility to decide whether any responses, should be made public or treated as confidential. We can refuse to disclose information only in exceptional circumstances. This means that responses to this consultation are unlikely to be treated as confidential except in very particular circumstances. Responses will be retained for the duration of FRAP and will be destroyed securely thereafter. For further information about the Acts, see the Information Commissioner’s Office website,
www.ico.org.uk or, in Scotland, the website of the Scottish Information Commissioner
www.itspublicknowledge.info/home/. For further information please visit
UKRI’s privacy notice.