HEFCE consultation

September 2005

Consultation on Guidelines. Deadline 19th September.

There will be a consultation on the RAE at 2pm on Friday 9th September at the Annual DSA Conference in Milton Keynes (for more information to attend, please visit our Conference Pages).

HEFCE have released guidelines on how the sub-panels will carry out their judgements of quality. The period of consultation closes on Monday 19th September and it is important that the DSA respond to the Guidelines generally and for the Development Studies sub-panel in particular. The Guidelines can be found at http://wwww.rae.ac.uk/pubs/2005/04/.

Please send responses into admin@devstud.org.uk, if you are unable to attend the Conference.

February 2005 - New Discussion Forum on RAE 2008

The DSA Council has a Working Group on the RAE 2008 convened by Allister McGregror and consisting of Ruth Pearson (Leeds), Phil Woodhouse (IDPM, Manchester), Giles Mohan (Open University), Cecile Jackson (UEA) and John Morton (NRI, Greenwich).

Members of the DSA who have a view or commecnt on the issues at hand are invited to participate in the new email discussion forum. In order to make best use of this, DSA members might want to make use of the inofrmation updates on the RAE website at http://www.rae.ac.uk

The forum can be found on http://www.devstud.org.uk/cgi-local/discus/discus.cgi, Please click on the link to RAE 2008 to join the discussion.

19th January 2005 - update on RAE 2008

Please read the note from Allister McGregor on the current situation and forthcoming meetings.

DSA Appeal to HEFCE successful

As you may know the Higher Education Funding Councils of the UK have announced that there will be a Unit of Assessment in the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 for Development Studies (see http://www.rae.ac.uk/pubs/2004/03/). The Unit of Assessment in this version of the RAE is called a Sub-Panel and Development Studies is located as indicated below. We believe that the level of recognition entailed in this decision represents a great advance for Development Studies in the Higher Education Sector in the UK and a success for the DSA in particular.

Extract from Annex A

RAE2008 Units of assessment and main panels

Main Panel	Unit of Assessment	Name
J	38	Law
	39	Politics and International Studies
	40	Social Work and Social Policy & Administration
	41	Sociology
	42	Anthropology
	43	Development Studies

 

DSA Appeal to HEFCE for a Development Studies Unit of Assessment - Deadline 19th May 2004

Allister McGregor, CDS, University of Bath, coordinated this latest appeal to HEFCE in response to the document "RAE2008: Panel Configuration and Recruitment" March 2004.

Please see the letter sent through to HEFCE and the Case for a Development Studies Unit of Assessment for more details.

DSA response to Roberts report

View the full DSA response to the Roberts report (September 2003).

The response on behalf of DSA was coordinated by Colin Kirkpatrick in consultation with the heads of Development Studies institutions. The most significant point of the response was the recommendation that a separate Development Studies sub-panel be created for the next RAE.

Note that the proposed panel structure is a different system to the 2001 RAE, where Development Studies was a sub-panel of Geography and suffered as a result of being evaluated by geography specialists rather than Development Studies experts. Under the new proposed system, 20 to 25 panels would be supported by around 60 sub-panels. So any Development Studies sub-panel would be separate from the Geography sub-panel. See the Roberts report for definitions of terms used.

One proposed alternative to a Development Studies sub-panel would be to cover Development Studies in a 'thematic' panel which would be designed to provide a focus for established interdisciplinary communities (see recommendation 6), but this was not a popular option with our respondents.