(Originally published in Manu Matauranga, the magazine of New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission.)

A British expert on higher education believes improved research performance is the result of research assessment procedures put in place for core research monies, similar in principle to the recently introduced performance-based research funding policy in New Zealand.

Bahram Bekhradnia, who visited New Zealand earlier this year, said "it meant that academics worked harder to attract funding. We now have world class research being carried out in England.  This was despite an overall 40 percent cut in funding per student over the past decade at England's universities which had come close to damaging the quality of education students received."

"There is a limited pool of money.  The judgment is that this is how funds must be allocated in the interests of a country seeking to maintain a world class position in research.  It's not meant to be fair but I would argue that UK research has benefited from the policy," said Mr Bekhradnia.

Mr Bekhradnia was in New Zealand earlier this year on a visit sponsored by the TEC.  He gave a public seminar and spoke with government and education policy specialists in Wellington.

"The UK Treasury was persuaded that there had been a genuine improvement [in research outcomes] and funding was recently increased by 25 percent."

Objective indicators of research quality included:

• UK ranks first in the world in terms of the number of papers per £ and the number of citations per £
• UK's share of most cited 1 percent of papers had risen 63 percent between 1996 and 2001
• the extent to which the UK citation rate outperformed the rest of the world had risen nearly 50 percent since 1996.

Mr Bekhradnia noted that some universities, notably Oxford and Cambridge Universities, had strong research programmes while others received little or no research funding at all.  "In broad terms, 25 percent of England's 130 universities received some 75 percent of core research funding," Mr Bekhradnia said.  "This stratification in higher education institutions was very culture specific to the UK, and not necessarily something that would suit other countries.

A similar attempt to introduce an assessment mechanism that judged teaching quality in English universities had failed.  It had been viewed as heavy-handed and simplistic, with six or seven people 'parachuting' in, attending lectures and workshops and scoring on certain criteria.  "It was widely unpopular and never accepted as a valid process.  This meant that quality of research was still seen as the only credible way of evaluating a university's performance."

In England a central funding body funds universities, not the government directly.  This is a slightly awkward arrangement.  "Governments may not get involved in funding issues of individual universities, but nevertheless they set the overall policy framework.  There's a lot of ambiguity," Mr Bekhradnia said.

"The government, understandably, wants to have a say about how selective the funding will be, and how steep that slope will be, but the law says that it may not get involved in decisions and discussions about which universities should receive how much money.  The problem is: the more selective you are, the more Oxford receives, the less selective, the more other universities receive."

Other developments in England's higher education system are:

• the binary line between universities and polytechnics was abolished.  This, according to Mr Bekhradnia, "was not an unmitigated mistake", but the abolition had been made "without a great deal of thought"
• student numbers between 1984 to 1994 almost doubled to 1.6 million students, then flat-lined between 1995 and 2000
• there remained a huge disparity in participation between people from different social classes
• there was a large increase in overseas student numbers
• there was a big increase in engagement with industry, particularly amongst those universities that received little or no core research funding.

Mr Bekhradnia said higher education in England was at a crossroads.  He pointed out that many of England's economic competitors invested more in higher education, and England's universities were struggling to employ the best academics.  He noted too that the investment backlog in university teaching and research facilities was estimated at eight billion pounds.

"A number of basic questions need to be answered.  For instance, what sort of university system do we want?  Is the system about to grow rapidly - who says?  Who will pay, and how?  Will we see increasing differentiation between teaching and research, and will this lead to a more hierarchical system?  What will the role of the government be in all this?"

And if the biggest policy success over the past decade was the research performance of England's top universities, its worst failure was academic salaries.

"Academic pay rates are a disgrace," he said.  "Nurses, teachers - they have all had pay rises of up to 30 percent in England over the past decade, but academics' pay rates have stayed the same for years.  We are losing many of our best academics to other countries that pay better.  The issue threatens the entire system.  It needs urgent attention."

Bahram Bekhradnia is Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute in England.  He is working to identify long-term policy issues in higher education, and reliable research and data, and to ensure that senior policy makers and government Ministers are fully informed when making policy decisions.