The British Academy asks whether the dual support system is fit for the future
Dual support – the balance between long-term block grant funding (such as QR) and competitively-awarded project funding – underpins the university research system, and allows institutions to retain autonomy and flexibility about what they invest in.
This flexibility represents one of the “defining strengths” of the dual support system, according to a new report from the British Academy – but this system itself is coming under increasing pressure.
Based on interviews with sector stakeholders as well as an analysis of historical developments in research policy across the UK nations, the report makes the case that while the idea of dual support is formalised in policy, legislation and the division of responsibilities between government departments, in reality the system has become “tripartite”, with funding from tuition fees – in particular international students – needed to make the numbers add up.
“Research funding policy cannot be understood in isolation from higher education funding policy. Decisions about tuition fees, student finance, international recruitment, regulation and institutional sustainability increasingly shape the resources available to support research activity.”
But this is rarely reflected in policymaking, in England in particular. As one interviewee puts it, the split of ministerial briefs means that no-one in government thinks about how education and research policy interacts: “there is a chasm in the middle that is just getting bigger.” Another interviewee stresses that this was even the case when both were the responsibility of the same minister.
But this is not how universities experience it:
“While public funding is formally divided between institutional research funding, competitively awarded grants and teaching income, universities operate as integrated organisations, rather than as separate financial systems. Estates, laboratories, libraries, digital infrastructure, academic staff and professional services support both teaching and research simultaneously.”
The situation has not been helped, the report argues, by the fact that neither of the two most recent major reviews of English higher education – Browne and Augar – had research in their remit. The British Academy has been calling for a new major review of higher education.
The report also canvassed the views of senior staff at the Scottish Funding Council, Medr and the Northern Ireland economy department, the three bodies responsible for dispersing block grant funding in the devolved nations. All were said to have expressed “caution” over possible policy trajectories which might “further concentrate research funding or narrow eligibility for QR-equivalent funding”:
“Smaller systems with fewer institutions rely more heavily on a breadth of research expertise and subject provision, with comparatively less appetite for disciplinary specialisation. Devolved control over the allocation of institutional block funding therefore enables administrations to make different judgements about the relationship between excellence, concentration and geographic distribution.”
Today’s report concludes with five questions about the future of UK higher education research, such as how policy divergence can be supported while a coherent UK-wide system is maintained, or the appropriate balance between challenge-led and discovery research.
These questions will be further explored in the British Academy’s newly launched Higher Ground programme, which seeks to address the “fundamental questions” that underpin the higher education and research system.