Correspondence

Knowledge Exchange Framework 5 circular letter

From:
Research England
Published:

To Heads of English higher education providers
Reference: RE-CL-2025-05
Publication date: 23 September 2025
Enquiries to: general queries to kef@re.ukri.org

Dear Vice-Chancellor or Principal

Knowledge Exchange Framework

Research England has today published the results of the fifth iteration of the Knowledge Exchange Framework, known as KEF5. The KEF dashboards may be accessed from midday on Tuesday 23 September 2025.

The KEF5 dashboards will display the results of all English higher education providers that received an allocation of Research England’s Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) in 2024 to 2025 or that were eligible for a HEIF allocation and chose to submit KEF3 narrative statements to Research England.

There have been no substantive changes to the underlying methodology used for KEF5 and therefore the results can be compared with those of previous iterations since KEF2. This strengthens the time series of results available to institutions and provides better insights to understand changes in knowledge exchange performance over time. Full information about the design of KEF5 can be found in the June 2023 KEF3 decisions report.

Yours sincerely

Professor Dame Jessica Corner FMedSci, MAE, RN
Executive Chair, Research England

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