This blog was written by Dr Elizabeth Gadd, Research Policy Manager at Loughborough University.
I’ve spent my whole career in higher education, but this has been my first REF at the coalface. And so this month was my first in ‘REF Central’, our institutional hub of spreadsheet-wrangling and story-spinning, fuelled by a bottomless teapot and an excessive amount of cake. I’m not short of an opinion on the REF: its shortcomings and its possibilities. I even had a thing or two to say about REF results reporting. But nothing really prepared me for the rollercoaster of REF results day.
