UK universities will only win funding for research graded ‘internationally recognised’ or better in last year’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) – the nation’s principle audit of research quality, funding chiefs have announced.

At a meeting on Wednesday, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which allocates the public coffers for research to English universities, broadly outlined the how it will convert the RAE results into cash for institutions.

But universities will not find out the size of their slice of the £1.5 billion (US$2.2 billion) per year up for grabs until 5 March.

HEFCE said that research graded as ‘internationally excellent’ (3-star) will be funded at three times the rate of work graded ‘internationally recognised’ (2-star), and work assessed as ‘world leading’ (4-star) would be awarded seven times more money that 2-star work.

Work graded as ‘nationally recognised’ (1-star) and ‘unclassified’ will not receive any funding.

Research leaders had speculated whether work graded 2-star would receive any funding. (Due to limited funding, no one expected 1-star work to receive a cash reward.) A large proportion of the 52,400 academic researchers submitted in the audit were assessed at the top two grades – 17% at 4-star and 37% at 3-star. Concerns were expressed that HEFCE’s policy of concentrating funding on the best research, would leave little cash for 2-star graded work. (See Good grades, but who gets the cash?)

“We have gone for an open and transparent way of calculating the funding that represents best the results of the RAE,” David Sweeney, director of research at Hefce, told the Times Higher Education.

HEFCE also confirmed that funding available for universities in 2009-10 totals £1.572 billion, a rise on the £1.44 billion budget of 2008-09.