Cambridge University has been nudged off its perch as Britain’s leading research university, overtaken by its traditional rival Oxford and the London powerhouses after a two-year-long assessment of research quality.
Prof Madeleine Atkins, the chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, said the results were “the culmination of the world’s largest exercise to assess the quality of research” and helped make Britain’s universities world leaders. “Our funding has virtually no strings attached and the Ref provides accountability for that funding,” she said.
This time 20% of the ratings awarded in each subject were based on the impact of individual pieces of research – in an attempt to measure reach and effectiveness – and it was in this category that institutions such as Cardiff thrived.
Oxford is set to take the largest share of the block funding, after almost half of the research produced by its 2,400 academic staff was given the top four-star rating by panels of judges and experts in each subject, while the output of University College London’s 2,600 staff placed it above Cambridge’s 2,100, according to analysis of the results by Research Fortnight.
The results mean that an increasing proportion of research funding is likely to be sucked up by the so-called “Golden Triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London universities, according to William Cullerne Bown of Research Fortnight, which analyses higher education funding.
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