 Mewn gweld gwahanol, rwy'n cynnwys llehech chi ar gyfer y gweithlu mae'r Unif�� Eiweb Rydymol yng Nghymru yng Nghyrch Gwrthwyng yn Ysgol Lywodraeth, ac efo'w hwnnw i ni'n meddwl ar gyfer y Rhys-Ryth Mawr Yngyrch Pwyll Gymweld, yn ymd pastor. Oes nhw'n rhydwch yn y gweithlu'r ysgol ymdol yn dduyn, felly rwy'n gwneud y gweithliol ar gyfer y llwyster Gawr Yngyrch Pwyll Mawr Twyr Cymru, I'm going to talk a little bit about the research excellence framework 2014, because I'm aware that not everyone will know too much about that. In the middle of my presentation, I'm going to take you from Warhorse to the Womballs, that's the type of my presentation suggests, and from our current knowledge transfer partnership to the vital north partnership. I'm going to end by talking just briefly on the next ref and what we know about it. I'm going to represent this beginning, middle and end visually over the course of my presentation by building a bookshelf on the table in front of you, as you do. Once upon a time, let me introduce seven stories. As I say, they're the National Centre for Children's Books, and we're based in Newcastle upon time. We were founded in 1996 and opened obvious to centre in 2005. Our mission is to save, share and celebrate Britain's literary heritage for children. We do that by holding an archive of material by British children's authors and illustrators from 1930 to the present day. In our visitor centre, we have a series of exhibitions, which go on to tour nationally, all around children's literature, and we have a busy events programme, lots of learning and participation work out in schools and community settings as well. Now, I mentioned that Seven Stories opened its doors in 2005, and in that same year, Newcastle University founded the children's literature unit within the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, and this is a research group dedicated to the study of children's books history. So, between 2005 and 2014, the children's literature unit really closely collaborated with Seven Stories in a lot of different ways, and this led Newcastle University to submit the children's literature unit's work as an impact case study for the 2014 Research Excellence framework. Now, Research Excellence framework is the way that the government measured the quality of research in UK higher education institutions, and the last one was held in 2014. Ref 2014 was new, it replaced previous assessment exercises, such as the Research Assessment Exercise 2008. What was assessed? Well, the assessors looked at research outputs, research papers and publications that accounted for 65% of the marks. They looked at the research environment, so the number of staff and students in the academic department, they looked at the resources and facilities available to them that accounted for 15%. The final 20% of the marks were this new criteria of impact. Now, that was assessed through a series of specific case studies, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England defines impact as an effect on change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life beyond academia. And as I say, this was a new criteria from previous assessment exercises. I think that's really the big difference between Ref 2014 and its predecessors, because for the first time, academics had to prove to their funders that research had an impact in the real world beyond academia. Why is Ref important? Well, for a research intensive university like Newcastle, obviously reputation is good to attract the best staff and students. Benchmarking, the Ref helps universities to benchmark their performance against other institutions and helps them to make strategic decisions about where they focus. And funding. The Higher Education Funding Councils were going to use the results from the 2014 Ref to determine the amount of core quality research-related funding awarded to universities from 2015-16 onwards. So I mentioned that Seven Stories was one of those case studies for Newcastle, and you can go and read our impact case study. It is on the research excellence framework impact site, so impact.ref.at.uk. When we're at Seven Stories, we are the first hit, and I do recommend you read it. So, I hear you ask, what happened between 2005 and 2014? I'm not going to tell you in detail in my presentation today, because I think you can go and read the case study, and that will tell you, but just to sum up, it talks about how the Children's Research Unit's research has underpinned the development of Seven Stories archive, how it has supported Seven Stories exhibitions, how the staff from the Children's Research Unit's research has contributed to the professional development of Seven Stories staff, how their work has raised the profile of the Seven Stories collection internationally, and how their work contributed to Seven Stories receiving Arts Council England's national accreditation, national styling, to call themselves the National Centre for Children's Books in 2012. Now, the Seven Stories impact case study on a four-star quality rating, that's the top level, and this is defined as world-leading in terms of originality, significance, and rigor. Together with the other case studies, this led to the School of English at Newcastle, ranking first out of all English departments in the UK for research impact, and first of all subjects studied at Newcastle University. So, going back to why it is important, in terms of both the reputation and benchmarking of the Children's Research Unit's work with Seven Stories, this has really done wonders for the unit and for the School of English, and for the partnership between the two organisations. And just talking in pure funding terms, I crunch the numbers, and just looking at that one impact case study without any references to Seven Stories in the research outputs or the research environment, that one impact case study related to over £60,000 of funding in the 2015-16 academic year alone, and that will recur annually until the next breath. So it's really something significant funding involved. So, read the case study. But what I thought might be more interesting to talk to you about today is what we've been doing since 2014 and what we're doing now, what's more current. So, the first story I'm going to add to my bookshelf is Michael Morpergo's Warhorse. Now, Michael Morpergo, award-winning author of hundreds of children's books and former children's or yet donated his entire archive to Seven Stories in, well, last year, 2015. And this formed the basis of a new knowledge exchange programme that's been going on between Seven Stories and Newcastle University this past year. So, we've been engaging through a knowledge transfer partnership, and if you're in the Progressive Partnerships session this morning, you would have heard a bit about an interesting one with the National Trust as well. So, our knowledge transfer partnership well, like all of them, is that knowledge transfer partnerships are a collaboration between a university and an external organisation. And they aim to embed university research into external businesses to help them innovate and grow. So, our knowledge transfer partnership is funded by the AHRC, the Arts and Humanities Research Council. And it aims to embed a research function into Seven Stories' collections and exhibitions team. So, Dr Jessica Medhurst, RKTP Research Associate, firstly looked at Michael Morpergo's archive to find the treasures within it, and this has informed Seven Stories' new exhibition on Michael Morpergo. Michael Morpergo are life-time stories, which opened in July in our visitor centre and will tour nationally, starting with the V&A's Museum of Childhood. So, Jess's work, as I say, helped us to sift through that collection, find what we had in it, and then she also wrote a series of looking-closer panels for the exhibition that were aimed at adult audiences to give more depth to the exhibition. He's also been disseminating this research at conferences and doing public events with us, so things like talks and tours. Now that the exhibition has opened, Jess's work, because she's here with us until December, has now turned to Seven Stories' Permanent Collections Gallery. Currently, we don't have a permanent gallery of our collections, but that's something we're aiming to open in 2018. She's been looking at our collections as a whole and trying to see what sort of narratives we can tell about British children's literature through our collection. To my knowledge, this knowledge transfer partnership is the first of its kind in that it's a partnership between a university English department and an external business, the first English literature KTP. It's also formed an important innovation for Newcastle as an organisation, because it's also been the first of three that we've managed to get in English. Learning and participation. I'm going to add to my book for this one, Beverly and I do's book Journey to Joberg, because I want to talk about the work of Seven Stories' Learning and Participation team, particularly the work they're doing with the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. The reason why I picked this book is because Beverly and I do's Journey to Joberg formed the basis of an innovative learning project between Seven Stories and Shot and Hall Academy in Newcastle. Seven Stories' Learning and Participation Manager, Debbie Beaks, worked with the school and the Seven Stories archive, and they created a performance based on the archival material, which, yeah, they then performed with Beverly, as you can see in this picture. Now, this is a really good example of enquiry-led learning, and that's a research interest of Professor David Leitch, who is a professor in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences. So he's particularly interested in community curriculum making. And Debbie Beaks has been working with David to use this as a case study as part of his research, and she's also been disseminating out events with David as well. Other work we're doing with the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences includes the Centre for Learning and Teaching is evaluating a project that Seven Stories are running called Living Books. This is an early years project around repeated reading, so it's encouraging early years practitioners and parents and nursery settings to share books with young children. And the Centre for Learning and Teaching is providing some evaluations of that project using a theory of change methodology, which they've got a lot of experience in. And we're also working with Professor James Law, who is a Communication and Language Sciences Professor. And he's got a particular interest in parent-child reading and school readiness, so we're doing a lot of work with him too. Fellowships and Studentships. So I'm going to add to my book out for this one. David Arman's My Dad's a Burn Man, because the first of the fellowships I want to talk about is named after David. So our David Arman fellowships are an annual fellowship that are jointly authored by Seven Stories at Newcastle University. And they're aimed at early career researchers and postgraduate students. And they enable you to come and go pay a study visit to Newcastle to study the Seven Stories collection. In the picture you'll see one of our other fellowship activities recently. This is Professor Karen Sanz-O'Connor. And she was a Leibahun visiting professor with us from 2015 to 2016, just left in the summer. So Karen is a professor at Buffalo State University. And her research interest is in the Black British Child in Children's Literature. So she came to Seven Stories for 10 months to study our collections and collections around the UK. And this has been some really interesting legacy projects. So we're collaborating still, the two organisations with Karen, to come up with a symposium next November all around racism in children's literature as part of Newcastle's Freedom City Festival, celebrating 50 years since Martin Luther King's honorary degree speech in Newcastle. And the last thing I wanted to mention was this heading was the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership. So Seven Stories are really pleased to announce that we're running with Northern Bridge a studentship offer as part of their competition. So Seven Stories are launching a partnership award with Northern Bridge as one of their strategic partners. And this is basically a targeted call so students can apply to Northern Bridge to study for a three-year fully funded PhD funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to look at Seven Stories collections. We're also developing collections collaboratively as well. So Karen's work, I just mentioned Karen a moment ago, she's been helping us to identify gaps in our collection in terms of diversity. Dr Lucy Pearson, a lecturer in children's literature at Newcastle has been helping us to assess archives for acquisition. And the book I'm going to add to my bookshelf for this one is Catherine Stor's book, Marianne Dreams, because this is forming the basis of a new resource that Professor Kim Reynolds, who's a professor of children's literature at Newcastle, is developing. And you can see a clip of it in the video that forms the background to this slide. So Kim's research is all around the Catherine Stor collection that Seven Stories hold. And she's working with both the Seven Stories collections team and researchers from Culture Lab at the University, which is like a digital cultures group within the School of Arts and Cultures. And they are together creating a virtual reality online resource where you'll be able to use your phone to go inside the house of Marianne Dreams and basically explore the house that is within the book. And as you focus in on particular objects, things will appear, things will move, characters will pop out, you'll find out more information about them. And as you go through the experience, it will also all get a little bit more odd and disconcerting as is the story of Marianne Dreams. So, yeah, in terms of developing collections, as I say, we're working with academics to acquire new collections, to look at the gaps in our collections and also provide new ways of accessing them. And Seven Stories also helps Newcastle University in terms of its public engagement with research. And for this one, I'm going to add to my bookshelf Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears by Emily Gravet because the Big Book of Hope and Fears is featuring in an event we're hosting in November, which is all around hope and fear in children's books as part of the 2016 Being Human Festival, which is the national festival of the humanities. So we will be doing a collections handling that involves the little white mice from Emily's book. We're also doing a lot of work together around schools. So we're working with the HRC's Living Legacy's Engagement Centre at Newcastle, and they're doing a school that's worked up with us all around our Michael Morpergo collection and the Michael Morpergo galleries. And Seven Stories are also working with the University Library's outreach team in the Robinson Library around a project on fairy tales for gifted and talented year eights and doing a workshop with them. And the weekend just gone, we also worked with the Newcastle City Future's Urban Living Partnership, which is a really flagship project for Newcastle University. And it's a research project all around the city of, the future of the city of Newcastle, Gateshead, and fostering innovation. So we had a weekend of activities at Seven Stories in our studio. We had lots of craft activities, which involved building a Newcastle of the future. And we had some digital workshops, too, all around looking at what Newcastle and Gateshead will look like in 2065. And although I know the panel today is all about research, I did actually want to mention the student experience because I think often collaborating with academics around students and teaching can lead to research collaborations. So I think there's definite overlap. And for this one, I'm going to finally add the Womballs to my bookshelf because this is forming the basis of some student placements we're offering this year as part of the Museums, Galleries and Heritage MA course. And we're also offering career development modules to any student who is eligible to take them. And as part of that, they'll be working with our collections team, helping us to sort through our Elizabeth Beresford collection. But we're also supporting other courses. We recently had a visit from the BA in Education first years. We've... Next week, yeah. We've got the English literature third year, children's literature students coming in for a visit. And we're offering project opportunities for music students, too. And the last book I have to add to my bookshelf today is Robert Westall's A Place for Me. And that's because I wanted to talk very briefly about the Vital North Partnership, which is the partnership I manage. So I'm Vital North Partnership Manager. The Vital North Partnership, as Laura mentioned at the start, is an arts council England funded project from 2015 to 2018. And one of its key aims is to strengthen and upscale the relationship between Newcastle University and seven stories. So my role as Vital North Partnership Manager is to basically facilitate, develop, project manage, provide communications for the partnership. So if it's a joint research project, if it's a joint teaching project, if it's a joint event, if it's something around a joint collection, I have some sort of hand in that somewhere. And I'd be really happy to talk to anyone further about my role in the Vital North Partnership, too. So I said I would finish by briefly talking about the next ref. Well, the thing with the next ref is that we don't actually know a huge amount about it just yet because the government haven't revealed their plan. But from what we know, we think it is likely to happen in maybe 2020 or 2021. That impact may play an even greater role. So the government previously said that maybe about 25% of the marks would be awarded to impact. And the Russell group of universities have called for impact to be measured on an institution-wide basis rather than just departmental. But I think all of these stories that I've added to my bookshelf today and all of the collaborations that I've mentioned sort of tell me is that Newcastle University are very likely to submit seven stories as a research excellence framework impact case study whenever and however the next ref comes about. And that's the end. And I'll be really happy to take any questions at the end of the panel.