Exhibition: OU Research at 50

National Research Assessments

In the early 1990s – following the creation of a new national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) by the HE funding councils of the UK – The Open University’s research work was able to be externally assessed and evaluated on a much wider scale.

The first RAE in which the OU participated was held in 1992, and used a ‘quality scale’ to formally assess submitted areas of university research, rating each on a scale of 1 – 5 (5 being the highest possible). The OU achieved ratings of 3 or above in 18 of its 22 submissions, with a 5 rating awarded to both the Art & Design and Educational Technology research areas. This success allowed the University to open a number of new academic posts with the extra funding generated.

The next RAE took place in 1996, and saw sustained improvement in the results. This time four further research areas achieved the maximum score alongside the existing two: Earth Sciences; History; History of Art, Architecture and Design; and Music. Over half the OU’s submissions were rated 4 or 5, deemed to qualify as “international excellence”, which in turn led to another increase in HEFCE funding.

In the 2001 RAE, the Geography department (led by Professors Doreen Massey and John Allen) achieved The Open University’s first ever 5* rating, highlighting the research in this field as world-leading. In the first clip on this page, Professor Massey can be seen over Mexico City discussing housing and urban design for an undergraduate Geography module.

The final assessment under the RAE name took place in 2008, and showed that more than 50% of the OU’s submitted research was classed as “internationally excellent”, and a full 14% reached the top grade of “world-leading”.

The RAE was replaced by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014, and the OU’s performance continued to improve. The proportion of research classed as “internationally excellent” or above had now reached 72%, and research in Education ranked 2nd in the UK (according to the Times Higher Education Power Score). Research in Development Studies was ranked at 5th place overall by the same metric, and in the second clip on this page Professor Giles Mohan outlines some of the subject matter in his much-praised research in this field.