To ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what assessment he has made of the quality of British university research relative to that of other comparable countries. [6939]
None. But the Research Assessment Exercise conducted periodically by the higher education funding bodies assesses the quality of higher education research in the UK against an international standard of
| Maintained schools in England1 | ||||||
| Local education authority | Percentage of 15 year old pupils achieving 5 or more grades A*-C2 | Rank | Secondary school pupil teacher ratio | Rank | Primary school pupil teacher ratio | Rank |
| Isles of Scilly | 73.1 | 1 | 8.1 | 1 | 15.0 | 1 |
| Kingston upon Thames | 59.9 | 2 | 16.2 | 38 | 23.8 | 78 |
| Sutton | 56.4 | 3 | 16.6 | 62 | 23.3 | 61 |
| Harrow | 53.5 | 4 | 15.6 | 15 | 20.8 | 11 |
| Barnet | 53.4 | 5 | 14.8 | 6 | 20.9 | 14 |
| North Yorkshire | 53.0 | 6 | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
excellence. Further, the Higher Education Funding Council for England has commissioned a study on the international standing of research undertaken in English higher education institutions.
In addition, earlier this year, the Office of Science and Technology published a paper on "The Quality of the UK Science Base", which measured the performance of the UK science base in comparison with that of other countries. This showed that with only 1 per cent. of the world's population the UK carried out 5.5 per cent. of the world's research effort and was a major force in research with an 8.0 per cent. share of world scientific publications and a 9.1 per cent. share of world citations.