Marcus Williams, Glenn Aguilar, Merran Davis and Hema Wihongi at last year’s Unitec Research Symposium, where Glenn and Hema won the ‘Research with Impact’ award.
Last week Merran announced our outstanding PBRF results.
It’s the fourth time we’ve participated in the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF), with the last round being back in 2012. Our success in the 2018 round is a significant achievement and reflective of the hard work that our academic staff and our Tūāpapa Rangahau (Research office) have put in over the past six years.
What is the PBRF?
The PBRF is a funding system run by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) that was devised to replace a previous framework which was based on staff numbers. PBRF funding is based on three components:
- Staff assessment ‘Quality Evaluation’ (six yearly frequency), 55% of the fund
- Research Degree Completions (RDC) (calculated annually), 25% of the fund
- External Research Income (ERI) (calculated annually), 20% of the fund
In 2019 the PBRF fund has $315 million available.
For the PBRF staff quality assessment each staff member’s Evidence Portfolio (EP) is assessed and then assigned a quality category (grade). Staff are rated A, B or C, or C(NE) ‘New and Emerging’, R or R(NE). The two ‘R’ categories mean the researcher is ‘Research Inactive’ or at a low level. The quality categories receive different levels of funding.
Unitec’s performance
These statistics give a summary of how we performed in 2018.
- 44% of our eligible staff submitted an Evidence Portfolio and were awarded funded ratings (281 academic staff)
- We submitted 128 Evidence Portfolios, of which 124 achieved funded ratings, which is a success rate of 97%. This is up from 71% in 2012
- Unitec is the only ITP that will receive greater than 1.0% of the total funding available through the PBRF
- We sit at 9th out of the 36 Tertiary Education Organisations that applied
In addition to these results, five of our staff sit on assessment panels that review the Evidence Portfolios – an honour only given to those researchers who are highly respected.
Competing on an uneven playing field
Marcus Williams, Director of Research & Enterprise recently explained how the PBRF was originally set up for the universities, which are generally ‘research-led’ with a lot more resourcing for research and large postgraduate programmes.
“For a number of reasons, PBRF is better suited to the university sector, therefore the success of any ITP must be seen in this context and is all the more notable.”
Marcus said the PBRF has been constantly reviewed since it started in 2003 and has, over that time, become more inclusive and expansive of diversity of research.
“The type of research that we’re good at and pride ourselves on is community and industry-engaged research that often has an immediate impact, finding solutions to real-world problems. PBRF still provides challenges for those research areas, but it is improving and the national ITP Research Directors group is pulling together strongly to make the system more inclusive.”
“Most importantly, I want people to be really clear about what we have achieved here under difficult internal and external conditions and I want to give a massive shout out to our researchers. Research takes long term planning, concentration, technical and critical skills, imagination, flexibility, collaboration, hard work, initiative and leadership. The hardest thing of all is carving off the time to get the work done in amongst so many other demands. Staff who meet the standard for degree teaching have my admiration. Staff who succeed at the national level in the PBRF, take a bow, you are stars!”
How will the funding be spent?
While the PBRF is distributed based on the grade that each individual staff member’s Evidence Portfolios received, the awarded funding will go to the tertiary organisation to use in their wider research programme. At Unitec, our academic staff members are given time and support to pursue their research. The funding received through the PBRF is distributed back into our research programme in areas that will benefit all of our researchers, such as:
- Unitec Transdisciplinary Incubator project (HTTRN)
- The ‘Early Career Research Fund’, that teachers can apply to, to support their early career research
- Open source journal publication
- The ‘New and Emerging’ start-up fund
- Workshops and masterclasses
- Support to attend conferences
- Support for our Strategic Research Foci
- ITP Research Voucher funding
Recent examples of applied research at Unitec
To read a bit more about some of the research that our Unitec researchers have been involved in recently, check out these stories:
- Unitec staff and students develop app for Auckland’s homeless community, aimed at creating connections, opportunities for work and personal development, at the 2018 Datacomp Hackathon event
- Dr Glenn Aguilar, Associate Professor Dan Blanchon and Lauren Hannah explore the effect of climate change on weeds
- Rau Hoskins and Jenny Lee-Morgan conducted research into how marae can assist with addressing whānau aspirations and needs for long-term, affordable and healthy housing, based on the approach of Te Puea Memorial Marae in Mangere, that assisted with housing homeless whānau in winter