Skip to main content
What types of page to search?

Popular pages: Undergraduate Postgraduate PhD Accommodation Research International students

Alternatively use our A-Z index.

About the Knowledge Exchange Framework

The Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) is a metrics-driven assessment framework.

Led by Research England, KEF has seven areas of knowledge exchange activity, known as perspectives, that are measured:

  • Research partnerships
  • Working with Business
  • Working with the Public and Third Sector
  • Intellectual Property and Commercialisation
  • Continuing Professional Development and Graduate start-ups
  • Local growth and regeneration
  • Public and community engagement.

Universities are grouped into ‘clusters’ with similar institutions for fairer comparison. The University of Liverpool is in Cluster V with 17 other very large, very high research intensive and broad discipline HEIs undertaking significant amounts of excellent research.

16 different KE metrics underpin the perspective results. The majority of data used is derived from HESA’s Higher Education Business Community Interaction Survey (HE-BCIS). Most of the metrics used are adjusted for the size of the institution, normalising by total HEI income, total research income, student FTE etc. Each KEF iteration uses the most recent 3 years of data.

Metric rankings are then calculated and collated to provide quintile scores for each of the perspectives.

Activity is measured for the university as a whole. There are no faculty-level or subject specific results.

Results are published annually on the KEF website in dashboards. These show our quintile score in each perspective, relative to the cluster average. You can view the most recent University of Liverpool KEF results here.

Narrative statements submitted by institutions every three years are published alongside the results. These are not assessed but provide supplementary information for areas where the availability of metrics is limited, such as for public and community engagement and local growth and regeneration.