The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) has announced that it will adopt three of TEU's proposed recommendations for conducting the 2012 PBRF Quality Evaluation of earthquake affected PBRF eligible staff in the Canterbury region.

The commission has agreed, following feedback from TEU and the affected TEIs, to create a separate Canterbury Earthquakes option to be included in the Evidence Portfolio schema, to ensure that it recognises the impact of the earthquakes on individual researchers.

The commission has also appointed a Special Advisor who will assist with training the evaluation panel. TEU argued strongly that the panel needed the support of someone who understood what Canterbury researchers have been through. The newly appointed advisor, local Cantabrian and University of Canterbury Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) Steve Weaver, will be able to provide 'on-the-ground' advice of the impact on researchers and will be a valuable contributor to the Quality Evaluation process.

Furthermore, the commission will allow, on advice from submitters such as TEU, PBRF eligible staff to choose 2005-2010 as their assessment period for research outputs if they wish.

"TEU lobbied the commission right from the start for these changes, said TEU national president Sandra Grey.

"We meet with our members regularly over the last year and provided the commission with substantial feedback directly from people working in affected Canterbury TEIs."

"We applaud the commission for listening to what our members were asking. These new rules are a dramatic improvement on the first proposal," said Dr Grey.