Published:
The Scottish Funding Council has announced the indicative allocations of its two recurrent research funding streams for 2015/16 and beyond, with figures which are good news for Heriot-Watt. (The allocations are referred to as ‘indicative’ at this stage because for 2015/16 they depend on the formal ratification of each university's Outcome Agreement and for subsequent years on future budget bills being agreed by the Scottish Parliament.)
This is a tremendous outcome for the University, reflecting all the hard work which went in to our REF results.
“As with those results, these indicative figures are both a reflection on the developments we have made in recent years and a strong foundation for the University’s future growth.”
The Research Excellence Grant (REG) reflects the results of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and a new funding model. In order to help manage significant changes in allocations among universities the new distribution is being phased in over three years, 2015/16 to 2017/18. Following from our excellent REF results, the funding outcome is highly favourable for Heriot-Watt University, showing a 22% increase in REG funding to £12.1 million by 2017/18. This is one of the fastest rates of growth among the research-intensive universities, and represents the largest increase in share in REG, from 4.3% currently to 5.2% in 2017/18.
Favourable result
This highly favourable outcome for Heriot-Watt is against the background of a sub-inflation 0.5% increase in the overall REG budget, and after the removal from the SFC research budget of some £14 million for the previous Global Excellence Initiative. As a result there are significant reductions in REG allocations to several other universities.
The SFC announcement also includes the allocation of the Research Postgraduate Grant (RPG) for 2015/16. Compared with the 0.5% overall increase, Heriot-Watt University achieves a 7% increase to almost £2 million, reflecting our continuing growth of research postgraduate student numbers, increasing our share of RPG to 5.8%.
Commenting on the allocations, Professor Steve Chapman said, “This is a tremendous outcome for the University, reflecting all the hard work which went in to our REF results.
“As with those results, these indicative figures are both a reflection on the developments we have made in recent years and a strong foundation for the University’s future growth.”