Supporting Music Higher Education Staff in Unprecedented Times

Last week we wrote a letter in support of our Higher Education members, who are facing unprecedented uncertainty in widely publicised problems in the university sector. As these financial concerns impact staff immediately, attention is beginning to turn to the next Research Excellence Framework, and how staff and their work can be protected. Our Research Manager, Dr Sarah Whitfield, has worked closely with several senior research leaders in the music sector to prepare the following letter to Research Excellence Framework Director, Rebecca Fairburn.

We are pleased that we have received a response to our letter below, to say that Rebecca Fairburn and the REF team are reflecting on this as they move forward.

Dear Rebecca Fairburn,

Raising our concerns about decoupling individuals from research

We are writing as a UK Subject Association for Music Education, representing our members as both individuals and music HE departments across the sector. We wish to raise our formal concerns regarding the intention to decouple research outputs from individual researchers, and to declare our support for the recent letter from the English Association, the Institute of English Studies, and University English. Decoupling research will negatively impact researchers across the arts and humanities; we write to share our concern for music researchers who face extremely challenging circumstances.

Music is a significant part of the UoA33 umbrella: the REF2021 sub-panel report found that ‘World-leading research was found in 97% of the 64 unit submissions containing music outputs’1. It went on to note, ‘the quality of HEI research in Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies is higher than ever, showing a notable increase compared to REF 2014, and laying claim to be amongst the best in the world.’ Despite these successes, music research faces unprecedented challenges.

While all UK university workers currently face job insecurity with massive looming cuts (‘up to 10,000 redundancies or job losses’2), the arts and humanities are experiencing structural erosion3. Of the 64 institutions which returned music research within the UoA33 umbrella, 54% have offered severance schemes with a further 27% experiencing redundancies. At least three music departments or sections have closed entirely or will be closed by REF 2029: Oxford Brookes University (which will close by 2026), the University of Wolverhampton (closed in 2024), and the University of Kent. Cardiff University has threatened to close its Music department by 2029 and has in the interim placed all music staff at risk of redundancy. Goldsmiths College, a leading music department with 83.3% of its research outputs 3* and 16.7% found 4*, has had its staff base severely reduced. The plan to decouple research from individuals could lead to a situation in which researchers are made redundant, only for their research to still be used in a REF return and the institution to be able to benefit from QR funding for research areas which no longer exist.

Music researchers – including artistic, practice-based, and more traditional researchers – face severe difficulties in obtaining secure employment. In 2021, research across all of the UK HEI ecosystem found that one third of all academics were hired on fixed-term contracts, while the ISM’s research with music academics noted that ‘85% of respondents had considered leaving the sector, with the main factor being job insecurity.’4

Many staff are hired across institutions in fractional or hourly paid positions, continuing to complete research outputs in their own time. Precarity particularly impacts early-career researchers, which damages their research development, and makes portability even more important. We believe that research excellence is built on the work of individual people as well as the institutions that employ them. We would also add to our English colleagues’ letter that creative research outputs in music require similarly demanding amounts of researchers’ time and resources.

We make the following recommendations, in the spirit of collegiality and in support of our members:

• The People, Cultural and Environment (PCE) statements should capture redundancies, restructuring, and job losses and indeed whole area closures.
• Careful consideration is given to portability to support individual researchers seeking future employment, so that past and present employers can each claim a link to a researcher’s published outputs, within an agreed number of years following publication.
• Care should be taken to clarify what the proposed ‘demonstrable and substantive link’ between researchers and institutions will entail and provide reassurance that any such definition will provide incentives for fair employment practices.

Yours sincerely

Bridget Whyte, CEO
Dr Sarah K Whitfield, Research Manager

1. https://2021.ref.ac.uk/media/1913/mp-d-overview-report-final-updated-september-2022.pdf
2. The Guardian, 1 Feb 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/feb/01/quarter-of-leading-uk-universities-cutting-staff-due-to-budget-shortfalls
3. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/latest/2024/04/conversationcreativeindustries/;
   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/26/the-guardian-view-on-universities-arts-cuts-are-the-tip-of-an-iceberg
4. Independent Society of Musicians, 2022, ‘The case for change’, https://www.ism.org/images/images/ISM-The-case-for-change-Report_July-2022_Online.pdf