Te Piringa - Faculty Of Law Increase in Research Quality

12 April 2013

Te Piringa - Faculty Of Law Shows Remarkable Increase In Research Quality

Te Piringa - Faculty of Law at the University of Waikato has shown a dramatic increase in the quality of its research outputs over a 10-year period, and the number one improvement since 2006, says the University’s Dean of Law Professor Brad Morse. “We are now very close to surpassing law schools that have had a 100-year head-start on us.”

The Faculty is home to the second largest concentration in percentage terms of world class (‘A’ grade) academic law researchers in the country. Among them is one researcher in particular who has retained this grading over three successive evaluations in the past decade. “Well over 50% of our staff received A or B grades, demonstrating that this is a team success.”

“The margin between the top five law schools in the country is now extremely narrow,” Professor Morse says. “This means that law students at all the country’s main centres can be confident of the high standard of research-informed teaching available and the quality of the law degrees on offer.”

Professor Morse says Te Piringa-Faculty of Law is developing and consolidating a particular reputation in specialist areas such as environmental, international and indigenous governance law, and boasts the highest number of Māori law students and academic staff of any of the law faculties in the country.

University of Waikato Vice-Chancellor Professor Roy Crawford says over the past decade the number of ‘A’ and ‘B’ researchers as a proportion of all academic staff across the university has risen from a third to more than a half at 54%.

“Ninety per cent of the University’s academic staff are research-active,” Professor Crawford says. “Students can be confident that classes at Waikato University are underpinned by internationally-benchmarked, research-informed teaching, and in particular our postgraduate students have direct access to top national and international researchers,” he says.

“We put ourselves on the line publicly to say that nearly half of our PBRF-eligible staff would achieve ‘A’ or ‘B’ scores,” says Professor Crawford, “and we have more than achieved that goal. This is strong evidence that we are building for the future.”

He says the PBRF research quality evaluation has two purposes:
• To ensure the University’s teaching is “research-informed” as its charter requires, and
• To determine how the TEC (Tertiary Education Commission) distributes the PBRF contestable funding pool.

The PBRF is managed by the TEC and the size of the PBRF funding pool is determined by the Government in its annual Budget. In Budget 2012, the Government announced the PBRF pool would be boosted by $100 million over four years to bring the fund to $300 million per annum in 2016.

Waikato University currently receives about $15 million in annual PBRF funding, of which $9 million is generated by the quality evaluation of its research.

Read more information about the University of Waikato’s PBRF results.

ENDS

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