Science minister Patrick Vallance has rejected concerns that focusing on “doing fewer things better” in research will lead to funding being concentrated in larger research-intensive universities from the Russell Group.

With science secretary Liz Kendall doubling down on the government’s message that UK research funding is “spread too thin” and funders should “prioritise” rather than “stretching resources trying to do everything”, concerns have been raised over how this more targeted model will work in practice.

For some critics, the push for a “more focused volume of research, delivered with higher-quality, better cost recovery” and a desire for more “teaching-only” specialists, as outlined in last month’s , could herald a shift towards concentrating research funding in larger universities, with other institutions encouraged to go down the “teaching-only” route for some or all disciplines.

Speaking to ����Vlog shortly after Kendall’s speech at the Science Museum this week, Vallance said this interpretation was a “very bizarre reading of the White Paper” published on 20 October.

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“What the White Paper actually says is that it’s unrealistic that every university can be comprehensive in the areas of research it covers – it’s not realistic, therefore there should be, in some cases, a need to really build on the ones you think you’re good at,” explained Vallance, who was chief scientific advisor to the previous government before joining the Labour government in July 2024.

“Some universities are being encouraged to go towards teaching only and select areas where they’re strong in research and…not be as research active in other areas,” he continued.

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However, some university leaders have privately raised concerns about how they would offer courses taught by research-active staff in some disciplines but charge the same sticker price for degrees taught by teaching-only specialists, suggesting that the latter would inevitably be perceived as inferior.

But that differentiation has already happened to a certain extent, said Vallance.

“There are already places that are very, very teaching-intensive, and there are staff already in universities who do teaching only. That is the situation now. And I don’t think we recognise that enough, or value that,” he said.

Students should, however, “expect to be taught at least at some parts of your course by people who are research-active”, said Vallance. “I don’t agree with hiving off researchers and saying that they never teach because then you end up with a situation where you can never be taught by somebody who is actually at the cutting edge,” he said.

However, universities could achieve research-informed teaching by partnering in a “local geography” with other institutions, he said.

“If you take a geographical region, you might have a course that actually goes across more than one university, or you might have teaching on a course that involves people from more than one university,” said Vallance,

“It’s already happening in places. The good places are already doing that and there should be ways of recognising and rewarding that not everything needs to look the same,” he said, explaining that by “coming together with two or three other places...[you] make sure that you’re competent across all the areas you want to be.”

“But don’t have everybody spread very thin,” he said on the pressure for all university teachers to be research-active.

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“It’s OK to have much deeper expertise in some areas than other areas, and you might also take advantage of what happens in a neighbouring place to make sure that, between you, you cover the areas that need to be covered.

“The White Paper was about recognising that there is a diversity in the way universities exist at the moment, and we must celebrate that, because that’s a strength – not a weakness. And we must allow them to work together where it’s appropriate for them to do so,” he said.

Both Vallance and the science secretary have stressed that funding reforms will mean “winners and losers” within the sector, with Kendall using an Olympics analogy to suggest this could mean a “no-compromise approach, where you give the most resources to the best-performing sports.”

“In other words, doing fewer things better,” she a UK Research and Innovation event on 24 November.

Vallance agreed heartily. “In the academic world, there’s no point spreading the money so thinly that nobody can do anything. You have to make it so that [funding] is available to do the right things,” he told THE.

“The consequence of prioritisation is you have to make choices, and sometimes that means that the individuals won’t get what they wanted,” he continued. “Frankly, that’s already the same situation [we have now] where people don’t get grants that they apply for. It happens so let’s be deliberate about that and make sure that we fund the things that need to be funded.”

A determination not to “spread [funding] too thin” does not mean – as some have suggested – fewer smaller research grants with funding instead concentrated in larger grants addressing national priorities, Vallance insisted.

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“We want to…make sure, if you’re at the beginning of your career, you can get a small amount of money to get you out of the starting blocks,” said Vallance, formerly a medical scientist who rose to become dean of UCL’s medical school.

“But there may be some big areas of research where actually what you would want to do is to fund a consortium of people across universities to try and tackle a big problem together,” he said.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) plans to designate £8 billion of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s £39 billion budget towards research focused on national priorities over the next four years. This division is part of Vallance’s “three bucket” model of research funding, in which UKRI’s spending is earmarked for curiosity-led basic research, applied research covering national priorities and key technologies, and then money to support research-led spin-outs.

To achieve this, UKRI’s new chief executive, Ian Chapman, is appointing “one person in charge of each one of those areas, or buckets,” explained Vallance. “He’s trying to move away from a trickle-down [approach] to each research council getting a sum of money, and just getting on with it to saying, ‘Actually we want to make sure that we have interdisciplinary, really strong, curiosity driven research’.

For some, this approach marks a shift towards more intentional funding of certain types of research that veers close to ‘picking winners’ and could even breach the long-held Haldane principle that politicians be kept separate from funding decisions.

Vallance rejects these criticisms. “If you read what Haldane says, [the approach] is entirely aligned with what he said there. His point then was, when you allocate research funding, you should do that because the people allocating it are experts in the research. They’re not ministers deciding this project gets exactly that, or that project should be funded over there, because that person is, you know, more politically acceptable than this person,” he said, noting, however, that Whitehall “departments need...to be well informed, in general, to do what they do” in terms of broad research allocations.

Having the three bucket approach is important for protecting curiosity-driven research even if the “proportions under those three headings are not very dissimilar to where they happen to be today, and that will evolve over time,” insisted Vallance.

“What we’re going to do is maintain and protect the curiosity-driven research, because that’s the one that’s always most vulnerable. If you let that go, you can never get it back again.

“But in the middle bucket of the funding on priorities, the proportion of that that goes towards the industrial strategy will increase over time, as new as old projects [come to an end] and new ones start.”

As a seasoned government official and lately science minister, Vallance knows more than most about convincing the Treasury and 10 Downing Street about the need for continued investment in research – particularly for longer-term research without a discernible pay-off.

Vallance suggested that the three bucket model can help with this task. “The easiest things to talk about in any government would be the block of money that tackles government priorities and immediate societal needs, and the block of money that goes to companies. And those are crucially important,” he said.

“But I’m strongly of the view that for this country, the foundation [of its success] is the curiosity-driven, investigator-led research that we’re really good at that leads to the unexpected discoveries, the sorts of things that are going to be important in 10, 20, 30 years’ time.

“And I want that to be visible and accepted, that we choose to fund that.”

That new articulation is more urgent than ever “because we have now got a much bigger opportunity for the innovation pot and the company pot”, he notes of the opportunity to increase funding for applied research and spin-outs.

“We’ve got thousands of start-ups, we’ve got lots of potential to really drive practical research, which needs to happen, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the other. You see that in companies [which often] stop their fundamental research once they get a product – they tend to end up being ones that don’t grow very well in the long term.”

“The ones that double down and say ‘yes we’re going to...make sure that we keep the early stage stuff going’ – those are the ones that have a long-term growth,” he said.

“There is a tendency to eat into that [curiosity-driven] stuff. Because if you stop that work, it doesn’t matter for three or four years. Nobody really feels the impact, other than the researchers, but you disable yourself for a very long period.”

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com