LSTM has been selected by Research England to take part in a Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) pilot, which will run between February and May 2019.
Overall 21 universities have been selected for the pilot which will generate evidence on how KEF will operate in England.
“We are very pleased to be part of this initiative”, says LSTM Director, Professor David Lalloo: “To have the opportunity to engage with the development of KEF and see how our strengths in knowledge exchange and public engagement can help determine the benchmarks, metrics and supporting narratives will be an exciting exercise which will hopefully lead to a successful pilot.”
The 21 participating universities have been divided into 8 clusters. LSTM and Cranfield University in Bedford, which specialises in engineering, are part of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) cluster.
Research England will work with the pilot group to test the specific metrics and proposed narrative statements, as well as the cluster membership, and how results should be presented, during a series of workshops between February and May 2019.
The outcomes of these workshops will be published in a report evaluating the pilot, alongside an analysis of consultation responses. Research England anticipates publishing these documents in early summer 2019, with final decisions on how the KEF should progress in 2019-20 in late summer 2019.
The government policy priority for KEF was set out in the Industrial Strategy White Paper in 2017. The aim of the KEF is to give comparable, bench-marked, and publicly-available performance information about higher education institutions’ (HEIs) knowledge exchange activities. It aims to allow universities to better understand and improve their own performance, as well as provide businesses and other users more information to help them access the world-class knowledge and expertise embedded in English universities.
Research England also administers the Research Excellence Framework (REF), but the KEF pilot and its outcome will have no influence on the forthcoming REF exercise in 2021
More information can be found here and here.