For Prof Dan Parsons, director of the energy and environment institute at Hull University, being based in one of the windiest areas in Britain is a major bonus. It’s where he’s set up a wind farm cluster called Aura, named after the Greek deity who could run as fast as the wind.
He’s doubly fortunate because last week the government announced it would be investing in a major expansion of the offshore wind sector, in the hope that the renewable energy source will provide a third of Britain’s electricity by 2030. Parsons’s team, just down the road from the world’s largest wind farm on the Humber Estuary, will be at the heart of it.
To make sure the university understands what the industry needs, Aura’s board brings together all the major business players with academic experts from Hull and elsewhere to identify gaps in research, innovation and skills.
The new wind deal is set to triple jobs in this sector, with nearly 20,000 new highly skilled jobs by 2030. “We will be crucial in meeting those skills needs, with courses including degree apprenticeships. Aura has been working to identify what sort of people are needed to drive this technology into the future,” Parsons says.
It is this sort of collaboration with business, and the way it powers the economy both locally and nationally, that the government’s new knowledge exchange framework aims to reward within universities. But the arrival of the Kef, as the new framework is to be known, has been met privately with weariness by many academics, who say they are already under enough pressure to show they are offering value.
Parsons is relaxed about the idea of more assessment, as long as it doesn’t erode support for fundamental “discovery” science. “Industry is all about immediate need. They are solving today’s problems and they need it yesterday,” he explains. “But blue-skies research takes a long time and you go down cul-de-sacs. We need both. The Kef is about finding a middle ground.”
Research England, the government agency overseeing research funding, has set out how the new exercise – which was first announced in October 2017 - might work. Universities have until 14 March to respond.
Gordon Brady, business partnership manager at Bedfordshire University, welcomes the Kef because it will persuade academics to work with external companies. “Academics who do that tend to be pretty successful,” he adds. “They bring in money and are promoted fast.”
But Brady is disappointed that the Kef isn’t giving the sector the boost it needs. “The perception is often that knowledge exchange is all about universities putting out clever new ideas into the world. But that’s utter nonsense. The problems are out there in the real world, and there is nothing in the Kef that measures how many real world problems are brought into universities.”
He is not the only person worried about the metrics the Kef will use to rank universities. One problem is that knowledge exchange is such a broad concept: it could mean creating local jobs, using research to develop products, doing consultancy for companies or running a museum.
Sarah Jackson, director of research, partnerships and innovation at Liverpool University, stresses that the Kef mustn’t force universities to be all things to all people. “It needs to celebrate specialisation and diversity,” she says. “Some universities may choose to place greater emphasis on intellectual property or on local growth as that is right for the institution and their region.”
Or as one Russell Group university manager said: “It’s unlikely that a world-leading research brand like Imperial College London or University College London will really be focused on local regeneration.”
To deal with this huge diversity, the Kef will divide universities into eight “clusters”, or peer groups. Their performance will be benchmarked against an average for their cluster. Inevitably there has been debate about whether institutions are in the right cluster, but Jackson thinks the idea is workable. Her one concern is that the results shouldn’t be hard for local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to interpret; she thinks the Kef should show absolute scores as well as in relation to their cluster.
Universities are also focusing on different aspects of the Kef. Prof Martin Jones, deputy vice-chancellor of Staffordshire University, says they are looking at ways to keep talented young people in the region. He’s currently seeking to emulate an innovative new postgraduate entrepreneurship programme at Falmouth University, funded by the European Union (EU). Launchpad offers small teams of graduate software engineers, digital creatives and business developers the chance to do a free master’s in entrepreneurship, while setting up a new digital business solving a real-life business challenge.
Jones says they are trying to challenge the idea that Staffordshire is just a place for low-skilled jobs: this is the famous Potteries, but the ceramics industry needs to move beyond plates to survive. Academics are helping to create advanced materials, from parts for jet engines to x-ray tubes, that will inject new life into the industry, and are training graduates with the skills needed to succeed the ageing workforce.
All of this is core Kef activity, which can be assessed pretty easily. But what about the things universities do in the outside world that are harder to quantify? Mark Reed, chair of socio-technical innovation at Newcastle University, thinks the Kef’s “obsession” with economic return is its greatest flaw. “The problem is that when you focus on economic impact you narrow and instrumentalise what knowledge is for and what value means,” he argues.
Prof Reed believes research can enlighten people and change attitudes, which is something of real value but may be hard to measure. For instance, research showing the connectedness of different races and cultures has changed attitudes to racism and led to a reduction in hate speech on social media.
“The government is very good at evaluating the economic impact of proposed policies, but they are very poor at evaluating the social impact – and that applies as much to the Kef,” he says. “[The Kef] will be a narrow and superficial vision of what’s going on, but [it will be] numbers and that’s what the government wants.”
Parsons is less cynical. “There is real value for us as academics in really engaging and understanding how our work can make a difference.”
For many, the elephant in the room is the prime minister’s impending review of post-18 education funding, which is expected to recommend a considerable cut to fees. Many vice-chancellors say that if there is no compensatory funding from government, knowledge exchange will be one of the areas cut.
Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute think tank, says: “The smart lobbying position would be to say to government, ‘We recognise that the political environment might mean lower fees, but either that has to mean less of what you care about, or you have to find new ways of leveraging funding to sustain those things.’”
Hillman says that vice-chancellors are already discussing using the government’s industrial strategy to lobby for extra support in this area, but they could also look to EU regional development funding. “The government has said regional development funding will continue [after Brexit], which begs the question: how do you divvy that up? The Kef metrics could be one way of doing that.”
