Published: 30 September 2024
St George's, University of London continues to show a strong performance in the 2024 Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) results, published by Research England.
The KEF is one of three pillars of university assessment, sitting alongside the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). It looks at several performance measures including public and community engagement, working with partners (from small local companies to big businesses), and how research is commercialised.
By scoring universities against strict criteria, it enables higher education institutions to benchmark themselves against the wider sector and better understand their own performance to further a culture of continuous improvement.
Successful research partnerships
Results from the fourth iteration of the KEF revealed that St George’s has continued to improve its research partnerships, moving up to the highest rating of ‘very high engagement’ compared to other universities. This highlights the ongoing success in fostering significant collaborations with academic and industry partners. It also reflects the institution’s strength in leveraging its expertise in healthcare and scientific research to create impactful partnerships.
St George’s work to engage with the public and third sector was also judged as ‘very high engagement’, and the university was ranked ‘high engagement’ for the commercialisation of its intellectual property, public and community engagement and success in working with businesses. These achievements highlight the university's ability to translate research and innovation into practical solutions for businesses, communities, and intellectual property development.
Above the ‘STEM cluster’ average
Crucially, St George's performance remains well above the cluster average of specialist institutions that focus on science, technology engineering and mathematics, excelling in five out of seven categories compared to peer institutions. These results reflect the University’s commitment to driving forward knowledge exchange activities that benefit society and the economy.
“Strengthening knowledge exchange is an integral part of our strategy to 2030, to ensure that the research and knowledge we have within the institution has the greatest possible impact. We’re proud to see St George’s grow meaningful collaborations, which are key to enabling effective and transformational knowledge exchange.”
- Dr Ambalika Batra-Penny, Head of Enterprise, Innovation and Contracts -
KEF4 adds a second year of comparative results to the picture of KE activity, further building trends that can be looked at in the performance of English higher education providers over time.
This fourth iteration of the framework continues the robust unchanged technical methodology used in KEF2 and KEF3, and incorporates the latest data to provide up-to-date performance results.
St George’s, University of London formally merged with City, University of London on 1st August 2024, creating City St George’s, University of London, a powerful multi-faculty institution with a distinctive focus on professional education and research at the frontier of practice. This iteration of the KEF results takes into account the period prior to St George’s and City merging. Read about how City performed here.
Learn more about the Enterprise and Innovation team