The Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) was announced as part of the government’s Industrial Strategy which, among other things, promised increasing funding for research and knowledge exchange.
The KEF is intended to 'increase efficiency and effectiveness in the use of public funding for knowledge exchange (KE), [and] to further a culture of continuous improvement in universities by providing a package of support to keep English university knowledge exchange operating at a world class standard. It aims to address the full range of KE activities'. The KEF has two strands:
- principles and good practice
- metrics
As defined by Research England, the purposes of the KEF are to provide:
- universities with new tools to understand, benchmark and improve their individual performance
- businesses and other collaborators or users with more information on universities’ individual strengths in KE
- greater public visibility and accountability of university KE activities
Oxford, placed in KEF cluster V made up of ‘very large, very high research intensive and broad-discipline universities undertaking significant amounts of excellent research’, performed above average when benchmarked against peer institutions in six of the seven framework perspectives.
In four of these Oxford was ranked in the top 10% of all UK Higher Education institutions: Working with Business, Working with the Public and Third Sector, and IP and Commercialisation, and Public and Community Engagement.
The results and narrative statements for all English universities are available through the KEF dashboard published by Research England.
Subscribe to Research England’s KEF Jiscmail list to receive official national notifications of announcements relating to the KEF.
