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As well as being a chance to look to the future of engagement and learn new skills, PER Day is also a great opportunity to celebrate and reflect on some of the amazing PER projects already underway. For PER Day 2019 not only were we celebrating the Institutional achievement of being awarded a Silver Engage Watermark, but we also presented our Light of Understanding and Alice Roberts PGR Awards for Excellence in Public Engagement.

The Alice Roberts PGR Award for Excellence in Public Engagement

For 2019 the Alice Roberts PGR Award was presented to Sophie Louth (Formulation Engineering), a participant on the Research Communication and Public Engagement PGCARMS Advanced Skills PGR module who developed a brilliant project called “Hands Up”. Hands Up was a school workshop on medical engineering getting young people to build and test their own limb prosthetics

The judges noted Sophie’s extremely thoughtful and diligent approach; carefully considering the safety requirements of using power tools in a young person’s event whilst ensuring that the workshop would be fun and give participants a really meaningful opportunity to get hands on with her research. The PGCARMs assessment panel were also really impressed with her application of public engagement theory and logic modelling and her use of evaluation.

The Light of Understanding Award for Excellence in Public Engagement

The Light of Understanding is our new Institutional Award to recognise individuals and groups who are carrying out amazing public engagement work. The Award is named after a quote by Sir Peter Medawar, Nobel Laureate and Alumnus of University of Birmingham, who was also a pioneer of research communication and storytelling.

We wanted to create an Award that not only rewards brilliant work, but catalyses more activity and acts as a beacon to be passed to other researchers. Therefore, winners of the Light of Understanding are rewarded with a grant of £2,000 to spend on further public engagement activity that helps spread their good practice to other researchers.

The award was judged by an expert panel consisting of
Public Engagement Committee Chairs, Prof Alice Roberts and Prof Ian Grosvenor, Prof Tim Softley, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Helen Featherstone who is a leading national public engagement expert. The panel were so impressed with the number and quality of applications to the scheme, that they decided to award a special commendation to PhD student Liam Crowley (Biosciences) for his portfolio of work promoting the work of our forestry institute, BiFOR, and in particular his work on the successful insect podcast, Entocast. Liam received £250 to spend on further PER activity.

The 2019 Light of Understanding was awarded to the Applied Memory lab who’ve developed a brilliant project call ‘Are You a Good Eyewitness’. The project includes a tourable exhibition which has been used to engage with over 2,000 children at the ThinkTank science museum in Birmingham and a website featuring lots of great images and videos that really bring their research to life. The judges were particularly impressed by their attitude towards involving researchers at different career stages including a team of 24 undergraduates. They also designed their activity so that they can use the data collected directly in their research and the experience has also affected aspects of how they plan to carry out future research. The activity involved a large number of researchers and students, but was led by Prof Heather Flowe, Dr Melissa Colloff and PhD student Danielle Hett and Melissa and some of the students collected their award and told us a little more about their plans to us the £2,000 prize grant to further the reach of this project to children from areas of multiple deprivation.

Congratulations to all our winners! We can’t wait to see where you take your engagement next!

It’s November; the time for underwhelming Christmas markets and for Public Engagement professionals UK-wide to get together and party share best practice at the annual Engage Conference, which for 2018 has moved from Bristol to Edinburgh. And delegates from the UoB PER Team were in the mood for a large glass of ‘best practice’ last night as Professor Tim Softley (PVC, Research) and Dr Eliot Marston (Head of Strategic Projects and Partnerships in MDS, and long-time champion of UoB Public Engagement), accepted a Silver Engage Watermark Award on behalf of the Institution (if you’re interested in our acceptance video, see here, the UoB press release is here and NCCPE blog post is here). The Watermark Award, sometimes likened to an ‘Athena Swann for PER’ recognises the commitment to Public Engagement at UoB and also challenges us to further embed it throughout the fabric of our research environment.

The NCCPE (National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement), which is the national body that assesses and grants Watermark Awards, praised our commitment to PER, recognising the incredible hard work of Research Engagement Officer, Caroline Gillett, and excellent support schemes, such as Leading to Engage (L2E) (which will be relaunching in the new year). But we know there’s more to do. We’ve created a Watermark Action Plan in which we have outlined a range of commitments to improve and expand our support for high quality engagement, such as a new Award (watch this space for details), more training opportunities, like our Creative Engagement which starts with Graphic Engagement on 6th December, plus much more that you’ll be hearing about in the coming weeks and months. So now we’re off to raise a glass or two to every single one of you who has been involved with doing or supporting engagement at UoB, the Watermark is for all your hard work in bringing amazing research to the public. Cheers!

But that’s not all we’ve got to celebrate – read on to hear about the 2018 winner of the Medical and Dental Sciences Early Career (PERCAT) Excellence in Public Engagement Award, plus of course our usual plethora of opportunities and events to take you into an engaging 2019.

Join the PER Team on 5^th December from 11:30am-1:30pm in WG5 Aston Webb – to consider the difficult questions in engagement and impact.

How do we change and then evidence a change in public perception? Whose minds should we be changing ? Does the future lie in immersive digital experiences or will mass media always win the day?

The session will include some practical tools you can use so it would be useful to come with a relevant research project in mind.

Register here – with the added bonus of lunch included.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham are looking for volunteers with an engineering background to support an exciting STEM outreach project for local primary school students. This is a national project to create the opening ceremony of an international manufacturing conference at the ICC on 18^th Aug 2019. As part of the ceremony the organisers want to break the world record for the number of people playing a piano at the same time, currently 88. The Birmingham Conservatoire are partnering on the project and have composed a piece to be premiered as part of the record breaking attempt. Fitting this many people around a piano is a significant challenge, which it is hoped the children will help to solve by creating a device to allow people to press the keys remotely.

Volunteers will go into local schools to help children design and develop their devices during the autumn and spring terms this academic year using kits and resources developed by the organisers. All volunteers will also be offered full training, which will take place at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on the 21^st October.

Find out more on the project website, and contact Richard Hood to register your interest in taking part, R.hood@bham.ac.uk

It’s mid-2018, which means that REF 2021 is looming large. If you’re a stranger to REF, or the Research Excellence Framework (lucky you!), then let me explain. There are around 162 Higher Education establishments in the UK in receipt of Government funding. Those establishments employ around 500,000 staff, including about 200,000 researchers and serve a population of around 2.3 million students, based on recent data. Different Institutions can be vastly different in all sorts of ways so central funding is allocated according to ‘excellence’, but how on earth is that possible to quantify? For one research area ‘excellent’ might be one paper every decade, but leading to a fundamental change to the way we live or understand the world many years hence. For others ‘excellent’ might be small, iterative changes to process that incrementally improve peoples lives, but whose ripples are (intentionally) almost imperceptible. Well REF tries to do just that. It takes into account the obvious things, like publications, normalises data as far as possible, like splitting subjects into defined groups, adjusting for staff numbers etc and then tries to divvy up who the most and least excellent are.

But REF also tries to take into consideration the wider research culture and effect of research on society, by assessing ‘impact’. Put simply, this is a measure of how big an effect the research has had outside of academia. Be it through engaging with the public and impacting behaviour, perceptions and attitudes or through commercialising research to make business more efficient or effective or in influencing policy to ensure that legislation is in line with the most up-to-date evidence. Now, whilst trying to fairly assess and compare over 150 fundamentally different institutions according to their publication records is very difficult, trying to also take into account and quantify all of the myriad possible effects on anyone and everyone outside of the walls of academia is nigh-on impossible. All of this means that the guidelines and process for REF are revised each time to try and make sure they’re fair and reflect current best practice. The Draft Guidelines for REF 2021 were published in July and are open for consultation until October.

So what does this mean for public engagement? Obviously public engagement is a key way in which research can have an impact on society it’s also a very broad church. This means PER can be difficult to define and in some instances can be tricky to evidence and evaluate in the same way as other impacts like, for example, business agreements. So it’s important that the REF Guidance around Public Engagement works well and positively reinforces PER as an intrinsic part of research excellence. The risk is, if the guidance makes it difficult for assessors to understand or recognise all of the types of brilliant public engagement and their importance, Universities who include more innovative types of high-quality engagement will do worse than those who minimise the inclusion of PER. That in turn could discourage institutional support for PER and diminish its perceived value. So on 14th September the NCCPE arranged a meeting for around 100 Public Engagement and REF heads from across the UK to get together and thrash out the new guidance.

So what happened? Well, we talked, and ruminated and discussed and confabulated and got passionate (yes, really, about REF Guidelines!) because this really is a tough thing to get right. But in short there were a few key take-homes:

1. Public Engagement is conspicuously absent. Whilst the few explicit mentions of PER are positive and seemingly intentionally vague, which leaves plenty of room for the inclusion of different types of engagement, this could also leave a lot of room for variation in how engagement is recognised and assessed.
2. Annex A could try harder. Whilst the inclusion of Annex A (essentially a great, big list of different types of indicators or evidence to support impact types, including engagement) was widely praised, the NCCPE suggested that separating these indicators into three categories and then re-jigging the table accordingly, could make the assessment of impacts, especially those arising from PER, more fair and consistent.
3. Not all engagement is created equal. Just like research, some PER is easier than others, and it doesn’t always correlate that reaching the most people, or getting those most feedback means bigger impact. Working intensively with a few local people might be more impactful than going on the radio to millions, but not always perceived as such. Some audiences might take much more work than others and sometimes engagement is about getting lucky or a sudden change in what’s newsworthy. The NCCPE suggest that equality and diversity issues and the rigour taken in the approach (as well as the robustness of the evidence) should be explicitly included in the guidelines. Though the response in the room was quite mixed, it was predominantly negative and it was instead thought that the focus should be on all claims being supported by detailed and robust evidence.

The REF 2021 Guidance Consultation is open until noon on 15th October and the final guidance will be published in early 2019.