Elite sponsorship has never been a good model for the growth of systems. The RAE is presented as a peer-review process. This raises questions about the constituency of peers and the nature of judgement. Sally Brown's own comment on the low representation of post-1992 HEIs in RAE peer review addresses some of the issue. But the panel is not constituted as a representative group in that sense.
More salient is what and how research paradigms and methodologies are represented and acknowledged.
For example, if the panel is not pre-disposed to accept action research and evaluation as capable of generating new knowledge, then the work of some departments will be devalued in relation to others. This last issue is, to some extent, an argument about the values which drive this whole exercise. The emerging notion of evidence-based practice may favour the concentration of research resources in specialist institutions. In Education, however, and given the needs of schools and teachers, we need a more flexible, contextualised and situational approach to evidence - i.e. evidence related to particular problems in particular settings. This requires proximal research resources - at least as well as centralised ones.