Scottish results vindicate funding spread

Scottish universities are celebrating their RAE successes today and Universities Scotland is planning to use the results as ammunition in its campaign to place research at the centre of the country’s economy.

Scottish universities increased their share of internationally excellent research from 11.6 per cent in the RAE 2001 to 12.3 per cent in this year’s exercise, despite accounting for just 8.5 per cent of the UK population.

In 2001, 10 per cent of RAE submissions were assessed at the highest level while, in 2008, 15 per cent of RAE submissions were rated at the 4* level, indicating international excellence.

What’s more, this good fortune was spread fairly evenly across the country, a trend that has been taken by Universities Scotland as a justification for the Scottish government’s approach to distributing university funding.

"We were told that Scotland’s strategy of spreading funding a bit more widely and a bit more flatly would not work," says Robin McAlpine, the organisation’s spokesman. "Unlike in England, there is not a single university in Scotland that does not have any world leading academics. So, those who said that you can’t have a flat broad sector that is still excellent were wrong.

"Excellence happens wherever academics are given the freedom to think, and it doesn’t have to be at one type of university or another," says McAlpine. "The assumption that there is no alternative to research funding concentration has probably been discredited."

Universities Scotland is now planning to broadcast the success of its universities not just within the higher education sector, but to the wider public in a bid to combat the "endemic anti-intellectualism" that McAlpine says is holding the economy back.

From January, the organisation plans to lobby Scottish government officials and business to make the recruitment of postgraduate students a top priority as a tool for economic recovery.

"While the financial sector is collapsing around us, there’s this giant big flag saying here’s something the UK can actually do well," says McAlpine. "We’ve lost half of our entire financial services base. We need a new strategy and at some point someone needs to realise we need an alternative.

"Scotland needs to look at a new era. What else is there in which Scotland has 1,000 people named as world leaders?" he asks. "If even a fraction of the kids who picked up a bike after they saw Chris Hoy winning gold at the Olympics picked up a test tube after seeing Scotland’s remarkable results in the RAE, we’d be on the right track….we need to follow through."

For Universities Scotland, the Scottish result is also vindication for the research pooling policy that has transformed the country’s higher education landscape. It is in subjects such as physics, chemistry and economics that the 20 universities north of the border with England performed poorly in the 2001 RAE. Now that the universities have sought to combine their resources, these disciplines have shown to be the fastest growers in this year’s exercise— a result that McApline says is "no coincidence".