Supporting your preparations for REF 2029
The REF takes shape – and we are here to help.
Published today (10 December 2025), the REF 2029 guidance confirms major updates following the recent pause.
These changes matter for anyone working on engagement and impact strategies, as they provide significant new incentives to tell richer stories of engagement - not just as an add-on, but as a core enabler of impact and research excellence.
Key changes include:
The Impact Profile is now titled ‘Engagement and Impact’.
The guidance now explicitly encourages narratives that explain how engagement strategies and responsible practices contributed to reach and significance.
2★ quality threshold for underpinning research removed, widening eligibility for locally rooted and collaborative impacts.
The Environment Profile is now titled ‘Strategy, People and Research Environment’ (SPRE) and its weighting has been increased to 20%.
Engagement is now explicitly part of the environment narrative. Institutions must show how engagement is embedded in strategy, partnerships, and infrastructure.
Panels want evidence of “distance travelled” since REF 2021 - showing progress and learning.
REF now values all roles and career stages - not just academic staff.
The NCCPE has published a blog post to reflect on the announcements, and we are planning lots of activities over the next 12 months to support the sector to interpret and act on the guidance. We’ll be releasing tools and methods designed to make engagement visible, valued, and evidenced in both Engagement & Impact (E&I) case studies and Strategy, People & Research Environment (SPRE) narratives, and offering workshops and toolkits to help you with your planning. These resources draw on:
- Scenario planning and systems mapping: Practical methods to connect research to real-world systems, identify public value opportunities, and design proportionate evidence strategies.
- Maturity models and theories of change: Adapted from our EDGE tool and informed by good practice in other sectors, these frameworks help institutions and units tell a credible story of cultural change - showing the distance travelled since REF 2021 and the effectiveness of strategies for embedding engagement.
- AI-assisted planning: We’ve also piloted the use of large language models to help researchers explore different pathways and mechanisms for impact, modelling the reasoning and ethical reflection that underpin strong case studies.
What next?
We will run a REF2029 briefing event on Tuesday 20 January 11.30-13.00 where we will take stock of the new guidance and profile some of the new resources we have been developing. See the link below for how to sign up.
If there are particular challenges you would like our support with do get in touch nccpeenquiries@uwe.ac.uk.
