Click here to see the full table of university research assessment scores

School Gate blog: should prospective students take notice of the RAE scores?

Top-up fees dominate every debate about higher education, but today's research grades are what really matter for the bottom line at leading universities.

The first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) for seven years - and the last of its kind there will be - covers more than £1.5 billion a year in funding for laboratories and other facilities. Cambridge alone received £111 million this year as a result of its successes in the last assessments, more than twice its income from top-up fees.

Exactly how much each university is to receive will not be known until March, after a period of intense horse-trading at the separate higher education funding councils for England, Scotland and Wales. But today's results ensure that funding will be spread more widely than ever before.

Every university - and all but nine of the colleges - were found to have “world-leading” research in at least one subject. Whereas previously a single score for each department meant that the efforts of outstanding researchers went unnoticed in mediocre departments, now a profile has been published for each department giving the percentage of work placed in each of five grades and identifying many unexpected pockets of excellence.

The grades were produced after months of analysis by 67 panels of experts judging quality in different subjects. For the first time, they considered applied as well as pure research, which is one explanation for top grades being given at some institutions with little tradition of conventional research.

The judgments will make or break academic careers. Even some work at Oxford and Cambridge was considered below the level needed to achieve national recognition.

But it was the ranking of whole universities that caused the most controversy as the results became known. Universities could decide which academics to enter, but because the release of total staff numbers was blocked after the threat of an injunction over the reliability of the data, it was impossible to tell whether some universities had achieved good scores by being more selective than the rest.

Lancaster University produced an alternative ranking using staff numbers from the year before the submissions were made, which showed that some universities with leading scores had declined to enter up to a quarter of their academics. Exeter University, for example, moved from 26th to 15th when all staff were taken into account, rather than just those entered for the exercise.

One vice-chancellor said that those who had entered a full complement of researchers were “feeling pretty bloody angry” because they considered the official results misleading. But Professor David Eastwood, chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, said that the grades were a fair reflection of research strengths.

The RAE is being replaced by a new system in 2013, which will use citations and use other metrics to reduce the burden of an exercise which cost £12 million to carry out, even without allowing for the time spent by the 1,000 panel members. But some element of peer review will remain to stoke the inevitable arguments.

For a full list, including specialist institutions, go to www.rae.ac.uk

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