PBRF news

The use of compulsion in the submission of Evidence Portfolios in the 2006 PBRF Partial Quality Evaluation – Information for AUS members 14/11/05

The Issue

Some universities are attempting to make it compulsory for staff who prepared an Evidence Portfolio (EP) in 2003 to prepare an updated EP for Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) purposes in the 2006 partial Quality Evaluation round. This is in spite of the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) PBRF Guidelines 2006 which describe a voluntary process for EP preparation for such staff as part of the “partial” Quality Evaluation round.


The AUS Position

AUS opposes the use of compulsion in the preparation of EPs and calls on university management to respect the TEC PBRF Guidelines 2006. Furthermore AUS calls on the TEC to remind universities that in order to be eligible for funding under PBRF scheme they must follow the Guidelines, including the voluntary nature of the EP preparation process.

What AUS is doing?

AUS National Council discussed this issue at its last meeting. AUS has communicated our position to the relevant vice chancellors, the TEC, the Minister and interested media. In particular we are attempting to convince the TEC that it should abide by its own Guidelines and tell universities that if they use compulsion they will make themselves ineligible for PBRF funding. We are yet to find out what action the TEC will take and have yet to hear back from the vice-chancellors or the Minister.

Refusal to prepare an EP

Our advice is that it is a lawful instruction for your employer to ask you to prepare or update your EP and refusal to do so may result in disciplinary action being taken against you. AUS will not have strong legal grounds on which to defend you in such circumstances. Any attempt by AUS to organise a mass refusal to prepare EPs is also very likely to attract a successful injunction from the university management and will be weakened by the fact that a number of staff have already prepared EPs.

Background

AUS supports a funding system that recognises and supports quality research. The PBRF meets some of our criteria but it also has major flaws, the single most critical being its individual base for assessment. Individual units of assessment are an unusual aspect of the New Zealand system, compared to the UK for example, and are especially controversial because the 2003 results were in some cases passed back to university management to use for purposes for which they were not intended – such as recruitment and promotion. AUS therefore supports the PBRF but with strong reservations.

The TEC decision to make EP submission voluntary in the 2006 round defused some of the more controversial issues with the Quality Evaluation, in particular the issue of the individual unit of assessment. Staff believed that they would have a chance to engage in a thorough review of this aspect of the system after the 2006 voluntary round was completed before the next full (compulsory) round. The Sector Reference Group, with both university staff and management represented, made this explicit in its recommendation that:

[N]o change be made to the current unit of assessment, particularly in light of the decision to conduct a ‘partial’ round in 2006. However, the SRG also recommended that a review of the unit of assessment be undertaken in preparation for the third Quality Evaluation

(Recommendation 8, Report of the Sector Reference Group, June 2005).

If some universities were now to make this round compulsory then they will be reneging on the compromise reached in this recommendation and undermining support for the PBRF process.

15 November 2005

Association of University Staff