When I was a junior academic, I attended my very first REF training session. It was run internally at my university and led by a senior professor who had served on a REF assessment panel. I remember feeling quietly relieved: finally, I thought, someone who could explain how the REF actually works, and more importantly, what I was supposed to do in terms of my writing so I could serve the department.
I expected insight into how papers were being scored that could translate into actionable steps I could take when drafting my own papers. Insight that would allow me, as an early-career scholar, to develop, recognise and then hone those skillsets.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, I remember sitting in that room, genuinely baffled alongside everyone else, as we were told that a particular paper was 4* because it was “magisterial in every way.”
That was it.
No explanation of what made it magisterial. No discussion of how originality, significance, or rigour were being identified on the page. No sense of how one might learn to produce work that read that way to an assessor.
I left the room, alongside all my peers, feeling none the wiser. Nothing actionable. Nothing clarifying. Just a lingering sense of confusion and, if I’m honest, inadequacy.
That experience stayed with me, because it captured something that remains endemic in REF training today, if your department or University even provides it.
REF is unavoidable in UK academia. It shapes careers, workloads, promotion pathways, institutional funding, and reputations, whether we agree with it, whether it is meant to or not. And yet, despite the stakes, many academics receive training (if they receive it) that leaves them unclear about how quality is actually assessed and generally feeling worse than when they started.
Poor REF training – and a poor REF culture in the department - doesn’t just fail to help, it actively harms. It creates uncertainty, undermines confidence, and encourages academics to second-guess their own judgement, or simply ‘step away’ from any notion that REF concerns them, ultimately hurting the University and Department finances. It can push some people towards overproduction (“maybe if I publish more, something will stick”) at a lower quality, or towards paralysis (“I clearly don’t understand what they want”).
For institutions, the consequences are serious. When REF literacy is assumed rather than taught, internal review processes become inconsistent, last-minute panic becomes routine, and genuinely strong work fails to reach its full potential in submission.
The problem is not a lack of scholarly excellence. It is a lack of clarity about how excellence is read.
REF is not an intuitive system. It has its own evaluative logic, and learning how that logic operates requires explicit training. When that training collapses into vague descriptors or prestige language, academics are left guessing and guessing is not a strategy.
If you have ever left a REF session feeling more confused than confident, you are not alone. That experience is far more common than universities like to admit.
And it is precisely why REF literacy deserves to be taken seriously. Not as a box-ticking exercise, but as a core part of academic development and institutional infrastructure.
Have you ever had a REF training experience like this? Do you even get REF training at all? I’d genuinely like to hear what it was like for you.