This week: calls for postgrad childcare support, UKRI funds top emerging talent, support for Ukraine and more

‘Fatal flaws’ in pandemic preparation

Scientific advice to the UK government in the lead-up to the pandemic was too narrow, according to the Covid-19 inquiry’s damning first report. The report pointed to “fatal strategic flaws underpinning the assessment of the risks faced by the UK”, arguing that the government’s “sole pandemic strategy, from 2011, was outdated and lacked adaptability” and that there was “a damaging absence of focus on the measures, interventions and infrastructure required in the event of a pandemic”. Ministers, said the report, “were not presented with a broad enough range of scientific opinion and policy options, and failed to challenge sufficiently the advice they did receive”. Advisers, meanwhile, “did not have sufficient freedom and autonomy to express dissenting views”. In her introduction, inquiry chair Heather Hallett called for radical reform. 

Full story

Support for Ukraine

Science minister Patrick Vallance has reaffirmed the UK government’s support for the Ukrainian science community. Speaking at a seminar at the Royal Society, Vallance said the government intended to “open up the UK science sector with meaningful partnerships and stand in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia’s illegal invasion”. The seminar, which was attended by a representative from the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, cemented an agreement between the two countries to collaborate on research. Vallance said: “We are committed to working with Ukrainian experts as they rebuild and reform their research and development ecosystem.” The UK has provided nearly £13 million via the Researchers at Risk scheme, which has given about 180 Ukraine-based researchers academic posts in the UK since Russia’s full invasion of the country over two years ago.  

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King’s speech big on tech

The Labour government has set out plans in the King’s speech to create an Industrial Strategy Council and introduce legislation on artificial intelligence. The speech said the government “will seek to establish the appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop the most powerful AI models”. A Digital Information and Smart Data bill was also promised to “help scientists and researchers make more life-enhancing discoveries by improving our data laws”. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology will lead on the bill, as well as on a Cyber Security and Resilience bill. Josh Burke, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said the speech had “policies that are examples of the change we need”, but he criticised it for the “scant attention paid to climate adaptation and resilience”.

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Call for postgrad childcare support

Access to student Childcare Grants should be expanded to include taught and research postgraduates, a report from the Higher Education Policy Institute has argued. Both groups missed out on the Conservative government’s 2023 expansion of support, which offers workers 15 free hours a week for two-year-olds. From September this year, this will expand to babies from nine months old, rising to 30 free hours of support from September 2025. The current Childcare Grants for undergraduates are available to students whose household income is below £19,795. Limiting these to undergraduates “creates a barrier for those with childcare responsibilities who wish to undertake postgraduate studies”, the report says. “This lack of equitable provision disproportionately affects women and those from lower-income communities.” The report calls on the new Labour government to rectify the omission.

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Picture of the week

Image: Number 10 [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr. Click here to see full-size image

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Alignment with the Nuffield Foundation’s priorities is vital for grant success

Top tips

• Ensure your research is aligned with the precepts and principles of the foundation
• Impact is vital but the foundation takes a broad and collaborative approach to assessing it
• Grants can be used for smaller projects as well as larger ones
• In both cases, showing that you have the right expertise and team to carry out the work is vital

Since its founding in 1943, the Nuffield Foundation has established itself as arguably the UK’s leading independent funder of research geared towards social policy in education, welfare and justice. 

As a funder that has long had impact as a priority, the foundation says it seeks to fund rigorous research and encourage innovation to improve people’s lives. 

The Nuffield Foundation’s central and longest-standing funding stream is the Research, Development and Analysis Fund, which is open now to outline applications, with a deadline of 14 October. It funds projects worth up to £750,000 for between six months and three years. Most grants are for sums of less than £300,000. 

The foundation also runs more specialised funding streams, including the Racial Diversity UK Fund, which focuses on the future of UK society as shaped by migration from former UK colonies. The Racial Diversity UK Fund is also open now, with a deadline of 14 October.

All Research, Development and Analysis Fund applications must be relevant to at least one of the foundation’s three core interest areas (education, welfare, justice) and also to the UK context, even if that is in a comparative way.

Competition for these grants is usually tough, with only 15 per cent of outline applicants typically invited to send full proposals. Alex Beer, head of grants operations and portfolio development at the Nuffield Foundation, suggests how applicants can raise their chances of selection to the full application stage.

Are there any recent changes to the Research, Development and Analysis Fund that applicants should be aware of?

We have just simplified our outline application form. We are asking fewer questions, fewer words are required, and we have shortened our overall application timetable. Hopefully that means it is easier and quicker to apply.  

What is your best advice to get over the threshold of the outline stage? 

To get over the line, what I would advise is reading our guide for applicants and understanding where our priorities lie. We are interested in improving social wellbeing; we are interested in the way that disadvantage, vulnerability and inequalities play out in the areas of education, welfare and justice. So, aligning the research questions with our interests is absolutely key.

How do applicants signal a bid’s relevance to those areas?  

There is a checkbox on the application form that says education, welfare or justice, but if the idea is cross-cutting, tick the box that is most relevant. Most applications are looked at by more than one person, and that will include people with interests across those areas. So, checking one box over another will not force the application into a silo.

What else is important?

We want to ensure there is that alignment with our priorities and a clear rationale for why the research question matters. Why is it relevant? Why is it needed? 

We also want a clear methodology. We are interested in a wide range of methodologies; quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods. The main focus for us is whether the proposed methods are suitable for answering the question that is being posed. And, finally, we want to understand how the research is going to make a difference and change lives. So, we will focus on impact. 

How do you measure impact? 

We have a broad definition but what is important is the project being able to ultimately deliver policy and practice change. We accept, however, that improving understanding and changing attitudes and behaviours are vital ways in which the research that we fund might make that difference. 

We do not expect applications to aim for all of those, but to set out which dimensions of impact they might be able to make a difference with and then qualitatively how they will progress to do that.  

We do take quite a qualitative approach to assessing impact, and we are open to how we do so. From the moment someone is funded by us, there will be a regular dialogue between us and them, with our aim being to support our grant holders to deliver that project and maximise impact.  

What does the rest of the application process look like? 

For the applicants we invite for the full application stage, we will set out some questions we have for them; some things that were not clear, some challenges we might have for them. We would expect the applicant to address those in their full application. If the applicant at that stage wanted a conversation about exactly what we meant by any of the questions, we are more than happy to discuss that.

The full application gets peer-reviewed, if it meets the quality threshold. All applications are returned to the applicant with the reviews and any additional commentary from us that we would like to see addressed. The applicants then have an opportunity to respond before the final decision. 

Where are applicants usually based? 

We fund a lot of research from think tanks and from universities, but we also fund research that is led by third sector organisations—for example, domestic violence charities or children and young people-centred justice organisations.

However, most of our funding goes to researchers based at universities. The current breakdown is 160 universities, 30 research policy institutions and nine charities, but provided the team has the necessary skills and expertise, then we are relatively neutral about where they are based. 

What considerations come into play when assessing larger versus smaller applications? 

One big question is, is your expertise sufficient to deliver what you are going to do? Grant applicants should highlight the strengths that are going to enable you to deliver the project. 

I should add that although the Research, Development and Analysis Fund invites applications up to £750,000, we still welcome applications for smaller sums—say, between £20,000 or £50,000—where those sums are more appropriate. I would not put a limit on the amount depending on a researcher’s career stage because that is not the way the foundation thinks about it, but it might be that earlier career researchers are after smaller grant awards and they just need to demonstrate that their skills and experience are commensurate with what they are proposing. 

We would expect the larger grants to answer more strategic questions than those posed by smaller grants, and for there to be more institutional involvement and more people and partners involved. There would also need to be an integrated and extensive engagement strategy.

This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com

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Are thematic priorities worth the effort?

Teenage dress sense and universities’ strategic research priorities may appear to have very little in common. But both hold to a universal law that I’m going to call the Phil Ward Principle of Homogeneity: the more unique we try to be, the more uniform we appear to others.

UK Tribes, a cultural research project by the broadcaster Channel 4 to identify the nation’s youth subcultures, puts it well when it describes the loose grouping of ‘alternative tribes’ of modern Britain: “Tired of cookie-cutter celebs and how everyone at school looks the same, alternative tribes are driven by the need to set themselves apart from the mainstream. From candy-hued hair to sleeve tattoos and multiple piercings, they’re determined to be different—but do it together.”

Difference is difficult

Universities are equally “determined to be different”, but are loath to “do it together”. They seek to stand out from their competitors, but are often unable to do so because their thematic priorities seek to include as much of their research as possible—and are therefore generic to the point of magnolia—but also be relevant to the external funding flavours du jour. As such, they inevitably bump into and overlap with others.

Earlier this year, I did an analysis of the stated strategic research priorities of the Russell Group of research universities in the UK and former 1994 Group universities (smaller research-intensive institutions that were founded that year). Of the 38 institutions within this cluster, almost two-thirds (23) had thematic priorities. 

I believe there are four reasons for doing so, and these can be mapped onto a continuum running from being a passive ‘shop window’ at one end, to having a deliberate and directive ‘case for cash’ at the other, as illustrated in the Phil Ward Continuum of Priority Rationalisation presented here:

Most institutions present their themes as articles of faith, corresponding closely with the second and third rationales (‘emphasise beliefs’, ‘prioritise efforts’) given above. Some evidence them with metrics. For instance, at University College London, ‘mental health and wellbeing’ is top of the metric totem pole (£20m, 150 researchers, 82 projects), while ‘justice and equality’ (£200,000) and ‘transformative technology’ (30 projects) are the poor relations. It’s a bit like playing Top Trumps. 

Few of the universities are explicit about having thematic priorities in order to position themselves for winning awards. Their cause is apparently far nobler. However, the University of Bath is refreshingly honest. It might start out saying that its thematic priorities will “empower our research community to tackle major global challenges”, but then it cuts to the chase. Its priority initiative “supports a culture of grant capture for multidisciplinary collaborations that address UK Research and Innovation strategic themes”. But what will happen when our national funder decides to refresh its themes?

The number of priorities for the 23 universities ranges between three and 10, with the average being five, falling broadly into the following categories:

Health: The most popular of the themes, with 20 of the 23 institutions having a claimed strength in this area, and some having more than one. Some are relatively specific, such as ‘cancer’ at Manchester or ‘infectious diseases’ at Liverpool, but most go for something more generic, from ‘healthy society’ (Imperial) to ‘health and wellbeing’ (Bath, Nottingham and York), ‘healthy living for all’ (Queen’s University Belfast) and ‘lifelong health’ (Surrey). 

Environment: Here, universities take bites at the same issue from different angles: ‘sustainable societies’ (Imperial and Nottingham), ‘sustainable cities’ (UCL and Warwick), and ‘sustainable food’ (Sheffield). You get a sense that, if you gathered together all this fractured and atomised effort, you really could crack this.

Society: The keywords here are ‘social justice’, from ‘striving for social justice’ (Bristol) to ‘social and economic justice’ (Goldsmiths), ‘social justice, inequalities and conflict’ (Kent) and back to plain old ‘social justice’ (Leicester).

Technology: There’s a creeping unease with technology detectable here. On the one hand, we have the exciting potential of a new dawn (from the vaguely Instagram-friendly ‘future life’ at Glasgow to a ‘smart society’ at Imperial), and on the other, a palpable terror of what’s to come (‘cybersecurity’ at Warwick and ‘secure connected intelligence’ at Queen’s).

Culture: You can imagine the strategic discussions that led to the final category. “Right, we’ve got the basics sorted. Shall we throw in something artsy?” “Yes,” comes the reply, “but we’ve got to make it relevant.” So Glasgow has ‘cultural and creative industries’, Goldsmiths goes for ‘invention, creativity and experience’, UCL has ‘culture and understanding’, and both Nottingham and York offer ‘culture and communication(s)’.

By striving to be unique, the universities demonstrate that they are anything but. The reasons are understandable, but do negate the value that a priority can offer. It’s rare and refreshing when a university offers up something unusual (I’m looking at you, Leicester, with your Asimovian ‘space power and AI’), but it’s risky: they will be waiting for some time before a major funder offers up a call in the area. When it does so, however, the payoff will be immense. While the others scrabble forth from their ‘health and wellbeing’ resting position, the space scientists of Leicester will be coining it in. The candy-hued hair and sleeve tattoos will have been worth it after all.

Phil Ward is director of the Eastern Arc regional research consortium, UK

This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com

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Back page gossip from the 24 July issue of Research Fortnight

Donald Trump’s choice of running mate for his US presidential bid will be of interest to universities on both sides of the pond.

Ohio senator and best-selling author JD Vance formally accepted the Republican nomination to run for vice-president at the Republican National Convention last week, making a speech that pledged unwavering allegiance to Trump despite previously having described him as “cultural heroin”.

Vance has long stated his antipathy to universities. At a National Conservatism Conference in 2021, he gave a speech called The Universities are the Enemy, which he opened by saying: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.”

He has praised Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s approach to higher education (Orbán placed universities under foundations loyal to his regime) and criticised higher education institutions for encouraging students to take on unaffordable debts.

In an interview with The European Conservative earlier this year, Vance said: “Universities are not so much after the pursuit of truth as they are about enforcing dogma and doctrine.”

That doesn’t mean giving up on them, he said. “We should be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

One way, he suggested, would be “to really go after the university bureaucracy focused on diversity, equity and inclusion”.

For many prospective international students weighing up study in the US or the UK, the UK might be about to become more appealing.

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Recruitment process well underway before election, but new science minister may have “names up sleeve”

The Labour government is likely to “refresh” its list of candidates being considered for UK Research and Innovation’s next chief executive, according to policy experts—with one warning ministers will have to “step carefully” if they reopen a recruitment process that reached an advanced stage before the election. 

While the Conservative government was eyeing a business figure for the post, new science minister Patrick Vallance is seen as likely to have a different set of preferred candidates. 

Speaking to Research Professional News on what the new government could be looking for, a source close to UKRI stressed that the next leader would need to have “enormous credibility in science”, as well as “demonstrable experience in running a major collaboration”. 

Selection process 

Diana Beech, chief executive of London Higher and a former adviser to Conservative universities and science ministers, told RPN: “A change of government likely means a change of focus for the future leadership of UKRI.” 

She added that “while officials may have put together a long list of suitable appointees for the chief executive heading into the general election, we can expect it is now being refreshed to match the preferences of the new government”. 

In January, RPN broke the news that current UKRI chief executive Ottoline Leyser—regius professor of botany at the University of Cambridge—would not seek reappointment when her term ends in June next year. 

Applications to be her successor opened in February and closed in April this year. Interviews were expected to have been concluded by the end of May, and a list of candidates selected by an advisory panel chosen by the previous Conservative government’s ministers. But, after the appointment was delayed by the announcement of the election for 4 July, the new Labour government has yet to issue an update. 

‘Big intervention’ 

Given the proposed timeline, John Womersley, a former chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, said he thought recruitment “may even be at the stage where a favoured candidate has been identified, and awaits ministerial approval”. 

He warned that “the incoming secretary of state and science minister will therefore need to step quite carefully”. 

How much of the previous government’s brief for the role will stay the same is unclear. The source close to UKRI predicted continuity like that found in the science briefs of the new ministers—such as the work on emerging technologies such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence and net zero, continuing from the previous government. 

On the other hand, Womersley said the government would not be expected to appoint someone who appears “ideologically beholden” to the Conservatives. Still, he stressed that reopening the search at this stage would be a “big intervention”. 

Strong business links 

Beech said she had not ruled out the “prospect that Labour shares the last administration’s vision to see the body headed up by someone with strong business links to boost the growth potential of UK research”. 

Former science minister Andrew Griffith, now shadow science secretary, floated the idea that the next UKRI leader could come from business when speaking at an RPN Live event in March. 

Beech believes Vallance will have come to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology “with a list of names up his sleeve of people he trusts to do the job properly”. 

She added: “We can therefore expect the new government to devote time to due diligence to get this significant appointment for the UK science community right.” 

The source close to UKRI said “the next leader will need to be visible on the international stage, supporting the underpinning work for international reputation leadership science in the UK, while working on areas of priority interest in government”. 

They also praised Leyser for being effective in this capacity, engaging with the research councils and working to increase their visibility internationally too. 

‘Significant financial challenges’ 

On other challenges, Womersley said the next leader “will need to regain the trust of both the research community and the government”—after former Conservative science secretary Michelle Donelan made false claims about social media posts by members of a UKRI advisory group and pressed the agency into an investigation—“while also getting on top of the increasing costs and bureaucracy that UKRI has suffered from, at a time when the UK higher education sector is facing significant financial challenges.” 

Johnny Rich, chief executive of the Engineering Professors’ Council said that given the crisis in university funding, it was “more important than ever that research funding reflects the true costs. If that means funding fewer research projects better, then it will mean the ability to prioritise becomes ever more critical.” 

He added that “UKRI needs to foster research talent, which will require an understanding at the top of how hard life is now for early career researchers”. 

“I hope they’ll be looking for someone who is an academic at heart at least as much as they are a chief executive,” Rich said.

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Ministers’ fresh approach welcome, but they cannot sidestep systemic problems for universities and research

Bridget Phillipson’s recent interview with BBC Radio 4’s World at One may have amounted to the most an education secretary has said about higher education policy in any substantive sense in the last 14 years. Indeed, she may have said more about higher education policy in that single interview than all her predecessors put together managed over the last 14 years (and there were a lot of them).

Not all of what she said will have been easy listening for university and research leaders: the government has “no plans” to ease the crisis in higher education funding by lifting the tuition fee cap, or by increasing direct public funding for universities, Phillipson said.

But she did take care to set out her desire to see the graduate visa route maintained, and for the government generally to support, rather than hinder, universities’ international student recruitment as a means to help ensure their financial sustainability.

There are problems with that position (more of which in a moment). However, it does meet a threshold set by sector leaders: if you can’t put any cash universities’ way directly, find ways to take off the pressure.

And there’s another way in which Phillipson has set out an important direction in her media appearances and meetings with sector leaders: changing the tone; putting the emphasis on working in partnership with the sector on policy, rather than waging culture wars against it for perceived political benefit; and focusing on the things the government can do.

Sector leaders see her more collegiate approach echoed across government. They view Peter Kyle, secretary of state in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, as understanding the interaction between higher education and science, and the importance of international student recruitment in the cross-subsidy of research in universities.

There has also been a warm reception for science minister Patrick Vallance’s early willingness to be combative on the need for visa reform to make it easier for the UK to attract research talent. Though behind closed doors, that may perhaps have earned him some guidance from civil servants on what it means to be a minister.

As the new government takes a new tone and approach on universities and research, there are some key tests for that coming up.

In this issue of Research Fortnight, we look at the decision-making that will be involved in the appointment of the next UK Research and Innovation chief executive, an organisation previously dragged into the culture wars, to its detriment, by Conservative science secretary Michelle Donelan.

That position will be key to the ambitions of Vallance to step up the UK’s performance as an international force in research and in key technologies.

And in our feature, we look at how, despite an absence of major legislation directly impacting universities and research in the King’s Speech, Keir Starmer’s government could reshape the sector: from measures to prevent universities going bust, to R&D budgets, to the implications of Securonomics.

Ministers’ shift in tone and apparent desire to work in a collegiate way—both across government with colleagues and with the sectors they are responsible for—is an important start.

But also in this issue of Research Fortnight, Nick Barr, the economist who helped design the income-contingent student loans system for the last Labour government, sets out the case as to why fundamental, far-reaching reform is needed in higher education funding. He argues that the solution is not a fee rise but an increase in direct public funding for universities, rebalancing the contribution towards the government and away from graduates—perhaps with the aid of an element of employer funding via increased National Insurance Contributions. Increased public funding would give the government more clout to get what it wants from the system.

Paving the way to such a rebalancing of funding, says Barr, would require the government to initiate a review of tertiary education that gets to grips with what society, employers and the economy need from universities, and how they should be financed.

Government moves to ease international student recruitment might offer a short-term solution to alleviate the immediate crisis for universities. But in the medium and longer term, that will extend the roots of one of the biggest problems in the system: the overreliance of universities’ teaching and research on cross-subsidy from international students.

A shift in tone won’t pay the wages of university lecturers and researchers; eventually, the systemic problems will need to be grasped.

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Stopping universities going bust, shaking up research funding, Securonomics—how Labour could reshape the sector

Labour began the business of government with a King’s speech on 17 July setting out plans for 39 pieces of legislation in the coming parliament. That figure was billed as exceeding the tally introduced by Tony Blair when the party took power in 1997.

While the number of bills may be on the high side, and although the new government has a huge majority, many political observers—and some in Labour—felt the mood of the Speech was notably cautious. 

Universities and research barely got a mention. That was despite prime minister Keir Starmer’s government stating loud and clear that kickstarting significant economic growth across the whole country—an area where university and research leaders are keen to play up the sector’s contribution—was its absolute priority.

However, not everything a government does is about legislation. Plenty of sector issues are filling ministers intrays—an absence of bills on this front should not obscure the fact that the government will have to wrestle with a number of urgent issues impacting on higher education and research.

Going bust 

The first priority will be ensuring that no university goes bust. If that happens, the fallout might reach even the most intensive of research-intensive universities.

In its annual review of the financial sustainability of the sector, published in May, England’s regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), found that three in five institutions were in deficit. It said this number could rise significantly if predicted increases in international student numbers failed to materialise. The watchdog warned that an increasing number of institutions would need to make changes to their funding models to avoid facing “a material risk of closure”. 

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute think tank, says this year’s university admissions clearing process could prove a pinch point. 

“If you’re the sort of university that typically picks up quite a high proportion of your students through clearing, but you have a bad clearing this year, that could be the thing that pushes you to the edge,” he says. 

Hillman warns that, should universities start breaking banking covenants, there is a risk of a domino effect, with lenders becoming nervous about the stability of the higher education sector and calling in debts, leading to more financial instability in the sector. 

Alistair Jarvis, now a pro vice-chancellor at the University of London, has suggested in a blog for the Association of Heads of University Administration that the OfS could provide a transformation fund that would bail out universities in trouble, similar to that made available during the pandemic under the Conservative government, which offered support to institutions, so long as they made major structural changes––an offer that most found resistible at that time. 

Another possibility, Hillman suggests, is a one-off increase in the English tuition fee cap of, for example, £500––taking fees to £9,750 in total. That has also been suggested as an option that might appeal to Labour by others, including Jonathan Simons, head of education at the Public First think tank. 

While Hillman acknowledges that a fee increase would be unpopular, he says the Labour Welsh government has recently managed it with relatively little backlash, and suggests that it could be mitigated through the provision of increased student maintenance support. 

The problem is that any changes to fees would take time to implement. Most of the 2024 cohort of students have already accepted places, on the understanding of £9,250 fees. The first deadlines for 2025 entrance will be in early autumn and potential students will already be attending open days. 

Asked by the BBC’s World at One on 17 July whether Labour would consider increasing fees or public funding for universities, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, said: “We have no plans in that space because we want to make sure we are putting universities on a more sustainable footing overall.” She indicated that the government would focus on supporting universities’ international recruitment to ease their financial worries.

Nicholas Barr, professor of public economics at the LSE and one of the architects of the original loan system introduced by Blair’s New Labour, opposes any fee rise, instead saying that the relationship between fees and state spending needs rebalancing. But he says this too would take time and that, in the shorter term, the government would need to inject “the minimum amount of public money that will stop institutions going bankrupt” and then launch a longer-term review of the whole system. 

A review is something many in the sector now anticipate. Jarvis has previously said he expects a major tertiary education review in the first term of a Labour government, likely to be launched alongside a spending review in 2025 after possible early interventions in an autumn budget. 

R&D budget 

Spending reviews will also need to spell out details of future funding for research. Labour’s manifesto commitment to “scrap short funding cycles for key R&D institutions in favour of 10-year budgets that allow meaningful partnerships with industry to keep the UK at the forefront of global innovation” has been widely welcomed, but it is not yet clear how it will operate. 

Martin Smith, head of the Policy Lab at the Wellcome Trust, suggests a “thin interpretation” (although still a welcome one) would be to focus on giving certainty to individual institutions. A more ambitious move would be to offer ways for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to plan for longer cycles, giving the national funder flexibility to manage its large budget between years. 

Smith thinks it unlikely that more money for research will become available immediately, but argues “you can still be ambitious on the direction of travel”, and that if the government does succeed in its plan to generate growth, some of that would likely come science’s way. 

Daniel Rathbone, deputy executive director of advocacy group the Campaign for Science and Engineering, suggests that longer-term budgets would improve general confidence in supporting research, including encouraging the business community to invest. 

He also sees the government’s agenda of devolving more powers to the regions—as demonstrated by the prime minister meeting regional mayors just days after his election—as potentially significant. “There is an opportunity there for regional R&D and innovation investment through the mayors and the combined authorities, some of whom will have a really good grasp of what the strengths and opportunities are,” Rathbone says. 

But Hillman warns that this will depend on the size of the pot. Without extra funding, more money for regional R&D could mean less for existing research streams. Similarly, he worries that pressure for more public money to help meet the full costs of research could mean better funding for less research. 

New science thinking 

One area worth watching is what happens to the Science and Technology Framework, launched in March 2023 to “cement the UK’s place as a science and technology superpower” by embedding science and innovation across government.  

Public First’s Simons suggests that the appointment of Patrick Vallance, the former government chief scientific adviser, as science minister is significant here since the framework was “literally his creation”.  

He argues that Vallance’s appointment shows that the government will start by taking a traditional and expert-led approach to research policy, but that it could later be more creative and deploy R&D to support national priorities under the guise of Securonomics––chancellor Rachel Reeves’ idea of making Britain’s economy more self-sufficient and resistant to potential shocks. 

Simons expects the government to want to focus research on defence, (especially as this could count towards the 2.5 per cent of GDP spend on defence to which the government is committed); climate change; partnerships such as the three-way Aukus security deal between Australia, the UK and the United States; and on supply chains for key technologies, such as quantum computing and semiconductors. So, in the context of Securonomics and the potential for the US to be a less reliable partner to the UK in future, the sector could expect “lots more challenge funds and specified pots”, Simon says, “especially if Trump wins the US presidency”.

Machinery of government 

In a recent article for Research Professional News, Diana Beech, chief executive of higher education umbrella body London Higher, and a former adviser to three Conservative universities and science ministers, argued that the decision not to unite science and higher education in one department was a missed opportunity.

But Smith says the retention of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, as a powerful department with science at its core, sent the right message and showed “the kind of level of understanding of the role of science in the UK that we’re looking for”. 

He says Vallance will be a strong voice speaking up for science, and keeping the department as it is means that civil servants and ministers will be able to hit the ground running, although strong communication between government departments will be essential. 

Immigration outlook 

Vallance has already made his mark by saying that visa issues, including costs, “need to be looked at” to ensure that the UK is competitive in science, while also telling the BBC’s World at One that Brexit has been a problem for science.

A government spokesman responded at the time by stressing that the government was “determined to bring down historically high levels of legal migration”. 

But many in the sector believe that a change from the strong anti-immigration rhetoric of the previous government is likely and could make a significant difference when it comes to international student recruitment. Not that rhetoric alone will be enough.  

“Universities are in a very precarious position at the moment and research in the UK is largely done in universities,” says Smith. Protecting that “crown jewel”, he says, will be essential. 

New sector leaders to hire

The government has three key appointments to make for universities and research over the next few weeks. 

First is the chair of the Office for Students. The previous chair, James Wharton, ex-prime minister Boris Johnson’s former campaign manager and a Conservative peer who continued to take the Tory whip following his appointment, resigned five days after Labour came to power. The process to appoint his replacement is now underway. Ministers could decide on someone equally political or someone more neutral, such as a former vice-chancellor. 

Also up to new ministers—under the advice of assessment panels—will be the choice of replacements for Ottoline Leyser, who will step down as chief executive of UKRI in June 2025, and Indro Mukerjee, chief of national innovation agency Innovate UK, who will depart in September. Interviews for each of those roles were supposed to have been completed by the end of May, but the appointment process was paused after Rishi Sunak called the election.

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Australian Labor’s reset of higher education policy is ambitious but incremental, says Paul Harris

As ministers settle in, what will a UK Labour government mean for higher education and research? Recent history in Australia can provide a point of comparison. Here, the Labor Party regained power in May 2022 after almost a decade of conservative coalition government.

In opposition, Australian Labor committed to an Australian Universities Accord—a new partnership between government, universities and the community. Once elected, it kicked this off with the largest review of the university system in 15 years, with students and staff given a seat at the table. In parallel, the new government also commissioned an independent review of the Australian Research Council (ARC), the first since its founding in 2001.

Through two waves of expansion, in the 1970s and 1990s, the Australian university system extended the benefits of higher education and research to communities across the country. The members of the Innovative Research Universities network trace their history back to these expansions.

Labor’s education minister, Jason Clare, has made equity his top priority. Going into the Accord review, IRU identified three trends that threaten this objective, making universities less representative of their communities.

Boosting participation

First, while higher education participation overall has increased in Australia, there are still significant gaps for students from underrepresented groups.

Second, expansion has turned into concentration, with students, research and resources increasingly found in a few large metropolitan universities.

Third, a growing focus on the private benefits of education, justifying increased tuition fees, and on research commercialisation over broader public benefits, risks privatising what should be public goods.

The final report of the review panel—led by Mary O’Kane, a computer scientist, former vice-chancellor and government adviser—was released in February this year. It made 47 detailed recommendations across a range of areas.

Asked to sum up the review, O’Kane summed up the review’s goal as “growth for skills through equity”—that is, increasing participation in post-secondary education by focusing on underrepresented students, and so giving the future workforce the skilled graduates it will need.

‘Strategic examination’

This May’s federal budget contained the government’s first response to the review. This included changes to student loan indexation to reduce debt, fee-free courses to prepare students for undergraduate study, a National Student Ombudsman, and paid placements on courses where work experience is compulsory, such as nursing and teaching.

The budget also featured bigger—and as yet unfunded—structural reforms, such as an independent Australian Tertiary Education Commission and a “managed growth” funding model for universities, with “needs-based” allocation of government support.

On university research, the government has not so far adopted any of the review’s many recommendations, which included major funding reform and a greater focus on the uptake and impact of university research. Instead, it has announced a “strategic examination” of government support for R&D, which will take place over the next 18 months.

But Clare has acted on recommendations from the review of the ARC, getting legislation through parliament earlier this year to strengthen the funder’s governance. A new, independent ARC board has been appointed and a revised ARC Act limits the minister’s power to veto individual research grants.

The act also codifies the ARC’s responsibility to “evaluate the excellence, impact and depth of Australian research”. While we are still waiting to see the detail, this will mean a new version of the Excellence in Research for Australia and the Engagement and Impact Assessment exercises—Australia’s version of the Research Excellence Framework.

What to expect

So what have the last two years taught us about universities under Labor?

First, a new administration doesn’t necessarily change things inherited from its predecessor that many might expect them to. In Australia, these include the proliferation of numerous policies on research security and foreign interference, as well as the Job-ready Graduates package, which skewed tuition fees across disciplines, and which O’Kane’s review recommended scrapping.

Second, a big review can be useful to reveal issues, build consensus and highlight the interdependencies between different areas of policy. But it can’t do everything—hence, for example, the Australian government’s follow-on review of research, along with separate new processes for policy on international education.

Finally, it is possible to reset the relationship between government and universities. We will have a new, independent commission, and the focus on equity is welcome. But big questions remain, such as whether students or the government will pay for an expanded system, and how to balance university autonomy with a more managed system featuring increased government intervention.

We don’t yet have a full accord between universities and government, but the Australian experience shows just how much can happen in a government’s first two years.

Paul Harris is executive director of Innovative Research Universities

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Internal meta research units could help tackle challenges of resourcing and culture, says Marcus Munafò

There is growing interest in meta research in the UK. Also known as metascience, or research-on-research, this is the study of the research ecosystem itself, using a range of methods from the sciences and social sciences.

The most recent example is the metascience unit created late last year by the previous government, and run jointly by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and UK Research and Innovation.

The unit’s aim is to fund “cutting-edge research into more effective ways of conducting and supporting R&D”. A call for £5 million worth of grant applications closed on 16 July.

The unit is an encouraging initiative that builds on existing strengths. Examples include the London-based Research on Research Institute, launched in 2019, and the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN). Both are academic initiatives that include a strong meta research element.

Funders themselves are also evaluating new approaches. The British Academy’s pilot of a partial lottery scheme for one of its grant programmes found that this method increased the diversity of principal investigators funded.

Know thyself

Growing interest in research-on-research can be traced to a number of interacting trends. There is a recognition that there is too much bureaucracy in academia, that many fields have issues with quality, robustness, integrity and reproducibility, that the working environment in universities is not all it could be, that academia has issues of equity, diversity and inclusion, and so on.

So far, though, most of the running has been made by funders, policymakers and grassroots organisations such as UKRN—but many of the challenges lie within institutions.

This poses the question: to what extent should universities and other research organisations have their own meta research units, focused on evaluating processes, and testing and evidencing novel approaches?

In some industries, this sort of empirical, internal effort is common. Digital companies regularly and extensively use what is known as A/B testing—giving random sub-samples of their users’ alternative versions of, say, headlines, recommendations or pricing information, in an effort to tweak content to their maximum advantage.

Could a similar approach be used in academia? For example, promotion applications often need several external letters of reference. Do these have any influence on promotion decisions? If not, can we do away with them and reduce the associated paperwork?

Levels of risk

Of course there are challenges. Not all institutional processes lend themselves to A/B testing. In particular, there can be ethical implications: experiments on promotion processes, for example, need to avoid inadvertently disadvantaging those randomised to one condition or the other. Staff would also need to be aware that they were subject to experiment, and if directly affected should be able to grant or withhold consent.

The level at which the risk is held is critical—in promotion processes, this potentially falls on applicants. But other things could be randomised, with the risk held by the institution itself. For example, the frequency, length and structure of meetings could usefully lend itself to A/B testing.

These may be difficult challenges but they are not necessarily insurmountable. Research studies in, for example, social, health and medical research regularly face and allow for such issues.

When randomisation isn’t possible for ethical or practical reasons, simply collecting data and tracking change over time can still be informative. And if institutions collaborate, then one could introduce and evaluate a process, with the other serving as a comparator, returning the favour later.

Untapped expertise

The irony is that the sector has an abundance of expertise for this kind of work, but it is rarely used. The report on research culture initiatives, published by UKRI in January, showed that remarkably few initiatives are designed in this way, or even evaluate for their effects.

How and why institutions should use meta research is itself a research question (meta-meta research?), and one that UKRN is currently investigating. Phase one will report this autumn and phase two, funded by Wellcome, in 2025.

With financial pressures looming large in the minds of universities’ senior management teams, internal meta research may not seem like a priority compared with increasing student numbers or reducing staff headcount.

But the first of these is not entirely within universities’ control, particularly when it comes to international students, and the second comes at a cost to operational effectiveness and morale.

Perhaps turning our research tools on ourselves can offer a better alternative—optimising how we work and getting more from the resources we have, and in turn helping to balance the books while also simply getting better at what we do.

Marcus Munafò is a professor of biological psychology and associate pro vice-chancellor for research culture at the University of Bristol

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Reversing decades of decline means focusing R&D on imitation and adaptation, says Pranesh Narayanan

The Labour party won the general election on a simple mandate: change. In the days since, attention has turned to what that broad mandate means. What change did 2024 Labour voters actually want, beyond a change in government?

Analysis carried out by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank and Persuasion UK, a non-profit research organisation, has found that, broadly, this base is united by a desire for economic change. There is also consensus on climate change, where over two-thirds of the Labour voter coalition believe that government should be going further and faster.

Labour’s manifesto recognised both these priorities, stating that the “clean energy transition represents a huge opportunity to generate growth”. This view emphasises the experimentation and innovation—rather than the spending—needed to achieve a net-zero economy.

This is particularly true for the UK manufacturing sector, which is in dire need of renewal. IPPR research shows that Britain’s manufacturing capabilities, in terms of the number of products that can be made competitively here, has declined by a third over the past 30 years, suggesting that British manufacturing has become less diverse and technologically advanced.

This matters, even for a country that prides itself on its service industries. Countries such as the US and France, which are similarly services-focused, have not seen any equivalent decline in manufacturing.

Green opportunity

The green transition is an opportunity to turn things around. The International Energy Agency projects that by 2030 there will be a shortfall of manufacturing capacity in several low-carbon technologies. UK manufacturing already has a comparative advantage in a third of the products and components needed to achieve net zero.

These seeds of green industry will only bloom if businesses, researchers and government work together. Much of the debate around innovation-led growth—and much of the lobbying from the research sector—emphasises the discovery of new technologies. Decades of decline, however, mean that, on manufacturing at least, a more developmental attitude is needed.

The new government should target what the economists Ricardo Hausmann and Dani Rodrik call self-discovery—the process by which sectors and countries identify opportunities for growth in established industries. Rather than pursuing the technological cutting edge, this often involves importing and adapting production processes from leading countries.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, Japan used this approach to grow both its cotton textile and steel industries. On cotton, it imported American technology. On steel, it hired British and German companies. Both experienced teething troubles but, with government support, were adapted to local circumstances, becoming international leaders.

More recently, in the 1970s, government subsidies and protectionist policies helped the South Korean giant Hyundai adapt ship designs and production process from Scotland, eventually becoming the world’s largest shipbuilder.

The common themes are collaboration between public and private sectors, and the transfer and adaptation of technology and skills from pioneering to developing countries. Public-sector support is vital because, as with other forms of R&D, the companies that drive self-discovery create knowledge that others can use without paying the same costs, meaning that, without other incentives, pioneers are at a disadvantage.

Follow the leaders

By our analysis, Britain is well placed to develop industries in supply chains related to wind equipment, green transport and heat pumps. Many of the skills, infrastructure and supply-chain networks needed are already present.

In some cases, such as electric trains, some manufacturing is already going on. However, self-discovery is needed to scale up this production efficiently.

As the world seeks to ramp up production of green technologies, there are likely to be shortages in manufacturing equipment. Importing cutting-edge equipment from industrial conglomerates based in places such as Japan and South Korea, and adapting these to the UK’s economy and environment, could bring much-needed productivity growth.

The research sector can play a major part in facilitating this process, particularly by identifying and building links with technological leaders around the world.

The government’s mission boards for economic growth and clean energy are likely to drive the strategic direction for industrial and innovation policy. The newly announced National Wealth Fund is another potential vehicle for bringing cutting-edge production processes into the UK, as it seeks to co-invest with the private sector in green industries.

Innovators should engage with these institutions to highlight opportunities to learn from technological leaders and help design an economic strategy that creates a balance between research into new technologies and those related to self-discovery.

Pranesh Narayanan is a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research’s Centre for Economic Justice

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Nicholas Barr suggests how Labour should approach the tuition fee system he helped design

To address the dire financial situation in higher education, the new government needs to operate along two time tracks. Short-run government actions will be defensive––notably any necessary emergency action to stop institutions going bankrupt. A robust longer-term solution, ideally with some cross-party support, will need time to develop, pointing to some sort of review.

Any durable long-term solution will involve more public finance than at present. Rebalancing what the taxpayer pays and what the graduate pays in fees as part of a wider reform of tertiary education is not something that can be fixed immediately. A properly considered strategy is needed, both for finance and delivery.

Meanwhile, the short-term need to stop some universities going bust will demand additional resources. Where could that money come from?

Private funding

The government has said it is not going to change rates of income tax, National Insurance or VAT—but that does not rule out enlarging the tax base. An example is removing the VAT exemption for private schools. The government may also want to consider restricting other VAT exemptions, such as for some luxury food items.

There is another intriguing possibility. An extra penny on the National Insurance Contribution of all employers––not just graduate employers––would generate £8.6 billion a year, some of which could contribute to university finance. Clearly employers would want something in return, notably a more productive connection between universities and the needs of employers.

Universities are about the transmission of knowledge and values, such as democracy or the rule of law, and about the development of new knowledge. That has always been true, but today they are also part of the growth economy. It is therefore legitimate to think about the relationship between universities and employers and what they may be able to offer each other.

While it would be politically difficult to get employers to stump up money on a promise of future gains, it is either that or forcing universities to compete for resources with schools, nurseries, the NHS––a competition they are likely to lose.

Public investment

But universities cannot do without public money entirely. The argument that tax cuts lead to growth is mistaken; lower taxes are not always better. Productive private investment needs to be complemented by productive public investment. Without investment in public services––and 14 years of austerity have robbed us of this––you get low growth.

The current system has high fees and large loans which most graduates do not repay in full––a high and scary sticker price together with invisible subsidies. The obvious answer is to have a lower sticker price and less leaky loans. That means bringing back some sort of teaching grant.

Increasing fees––even by inflation––would be bad economics, bad politics and bad social policy. But fees and loans should not be abolished. It is still mainly students from better off backgrounds who go to university, so over-reliance on public finance would benefit them at the expense of many less privileged taxpayers. Higher education would also lose out to more politically salient pressures on public spending, leading to less money for universities and for policies that improve access.

Access points

Loans allow young people to tap into their own future earnings and invest in their own skills. They are not primarily a device for widening participation, for which the important drivers are earlier in the system, from nursery education onwards. Making loans less leaky frees resources for those policies.

Graduates with good earnings trajectories should therefore repay their loans in full in present value terms, at or close to the government’s cost of borrowing, thus giving students access to the government’s risk-free interest rate.

In theory, a graduate pays for the private benefits, the taxpayer pays for the social benefits. The problem is that social benefits vary widely from subject to subject and are hard to measure.

Yet that should not be an excuse for ignoring them. Restoring some kind of teaching grant would give government a policy lever, allowing it to give extra funding to areas it wants to encourage, such as particular subjects or types of student.

Meanwhile, universities will need to learn to live within their means. When the £9,000 fee came into effect in 2012, they suddenly had a lot more money. That extra money was a bubble but some were wiser than others in recognising that and planning accordingly.

Tertiary sector

Crucially, all of this should be seen in terms of an overarching system of tertiary education. The time has long gone for further and higher education to be in separate silos, and it would be disappointing if any review concentrated only on how to pay for universities. What is needed is a strategy for tertiary education as a whole.

Ultimately, someone should be able to take out a loan to get a plumbing qualification and then, if they wish, turn that into a degree by adding courses in management or accounting, or, for that matter, history or philosophy.

The 2019 Augar review set out this line of thinking. A future review should build on that report, developing in more detail a system with more granular delivery––the ability to build skills in a modular way––supported by more granular finance. Since it will take time to put these policies into place, the terms of reference of the review and its membership should be an early item on the government’s in-tray.

There was a time when universities could insist they were pure institutions that had nothing to do with tawdry things like producing goods and services. They were part of the cultural life of the nation, like the opera house or the symphony orchestra, rather than part of economic growth.

Technology has changed that and universities should embrace the fact. Contributing to economic growth is an additional purpose of universities. Getting that right would be a win for universities, a win for employers, and a win for the economy.

Nicholas Barr is professor of public economics, European Institute, LSE

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Long-serving science shadow would have been a “fantastic” minister and role model, say academics

Academics have expressed disappointment and confusion at the Labour government’s decision to overlook Chi Onwurah for a ministerial role in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, given her extensive experience of the brief while in opposition.

Research Professional News understands that, rather than declining an offer, Onwurah was not offered a role in Keir Starmer’s government.

Onwurah was first appointed to shadow innovation and science in 2010, and served for Labour in shadow roles for 14 years, mainly on science.

Rachel Oliver, a professor of materials science at the University of Cambridge, told RPN that she was “disappointed” to see Onwurah left out.

“I think she could be a great asset to the government due to her undoubted engineering expertise,” she said.

‘Puzzling’ decision

Dibyesh Anand, a professor of international relations at the University of Westminster and chair of London Higher’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion network, told RPN that he found the omission “puzzling”. Onwurah would have done a “fantastic” job as minister, he said.

Onwurah has an engineering degree, an MBA, and was head of telecoms technology at regulator Ofcom before becoming the MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West in 2010. Her shadow roles include her most recent one for science, research and innovation, which lasted from 2020 until the general election earlier this month.

Paul Dorfman, a visiting fellow in the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, said: “Chi Onwurah’s engineering experience and her impact on science and technology policy during her time as shadow minister has been significantly beneficial.”

During that time, “she championed constructive science and technology interdisciplinary collaboration, and her approach to AI regulation was carefully thought through”, he said.

Dsit has recently announced an AI bill.

Achievements in Stem

Another role Onwurah held before parliament disbanded for the election was chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity and Inclusion in Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The group, which plans to resume activities in the new parliament, aims to promote the inclusion and progression of people from diverse backgrounds in Stem, as well as to encourage the government and other stakeholders to work towards building a Stem sector that is representative of the population.

Praising Onwurah’s achievements in this capacity, Dorfman said she “has been a prominent figure not only for her technical skills but also as a Black woman in a high-profile science role. Her visibility in promoting diversity and inclusion in Stem fields is key, and her absence from a ministerial position will be felt within and beyond Westminster.”

Oliver said: “Providing visible role models for young women and also for Black and other ethnic minority students is an important strand in efforts to bring a greater diversity of people into science and technology careers, and Chi could have been a fantastic role model.”

Meanwhile, Anand added: “Onwurah’s appointment would have been good for both expertise and representation and given a strong message to those in Stem areas that women—including those from ethnic minority backgrounds—can not only join but lead the field.”

RPN has approached Labour for comment.

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Sector hails plan for increased research and innovation spending, especially on the European Research Council

Research and innovation groups have welcomed the new political direction of the European Commission, after Ursula von der Leyen was re-elected as president and set out her plans for her second term.

Among the many plans announced by von der Leyen (pictured) for her upcoming five-year term was an intention to “increase our research spending to focus more on strategic priorities, on groundbreaking fundamental research and disruptive innovation, and on scientific excellence”.

Many in the R&I sector said the guidelines, which have competitiveness as a top priority, were well aligned with their own ambitions and wishes.

Lidia Borrell-Damián, secretary-general of Science Europe, the association of major research funding and performing organisations, said von der Leyen’s “focus on increased investment, support for fundamental research and emphasis on scientific excellence reflects the priorities we have already identified”.

But she added: “The success of these initiatives will depend on whether they are matched by ambitious and sustained levels of investment.” The detail of how strategies will be implemented will also be decisive,  Borrell-Damián warned.

The Commission has limited powers over EU budgeting; it proposes both seven-year budget frameworks and annual budgets, as well as budgets for individual programmes and instruments, but these are all agreed in negotiation with the European Parliament and the Council of the EU member state governments.

Research Professional News asked the Commission and the European Research Council, which is the EU’s flagship funder of basic research, how von der Leyen could deliver on a promise in the guidelines to increase funding for the ERC given these constraints, but both declined to comment.

‘Music to our ears’

Kurt Deketelaere, secretary-general of the League of European Research Universities, said “much of what is written on R&I in the guidelines is music to our ears”.

But his optimism was also caveated. He pointed out that while von der Leyen mentioned innovation many times in her election speech to the European Parliament, “the word ‘research’ was not mentioned once”. He said this was “a bit risky since some people still think that you can have fantastic innovation without groundbreaking research”.

Deketelaere said there would need to be a “good balance” between support for R&I based on politicians’ priorities and that based on researchers’ own ideas of what is most important. The ERC, which supports fundamental research pitched by researchers, provides “the greatest added value for every euro of taxpayers’ money spent on R&I”, he stressed, adding that it had proven its contribution to solving societal challenges such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

He said the Council of EU governments must realise that pledges in the guidelines to bolster European defence and strategic autonomy in areas including artificial intelligence would require “big investments in R&I”. The Council attempts to cut the EU R&I budget every year, and recently agreed to repeat this stance for 2025.

Thomas Jørgensen, director of policy coordination and foresight at the European University Association, said it was “particularly welcome” that von der Leyen had specifically sought to devote more funding to the ERC given the current political emphasis on financing political priorities. 

“In the next years, it will be important to repeat that we need a solid knowledge basis to make all the innovations for green tech and biotech that featured in her speech,” he emphasised.

Tech promises

On technologies, von der Leyen announced plans for a European Competitiveness Fund to invest in strategic technologies, including AI and biotechnology. Jørgensen said it was “important that the competitiveness fund does not eat into the future [R&I] Framework Programme and that they are complementary”.

He said it was “too early to talk about what is realistic” in terms of increased R&I investment but added that “the research sector should be clear from early on about what it needs” from the next seven-year budget framework, to be agreed in the coming political term.

The European Association of Research and Technology Organisations also highlighted the creation of the competitiveness fund as particularly positive, and said in a statement that its members were ready to support “further thinking and elaboration” on the nature of the fund.

The political guidelines also included plans for a dedicated life sciences strategy and a new Biotech Act, which were welcomed by the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations. It said that “the key to achieving these goals will be the development of coherent and supportive policies and legislation”.

Efpia said a strong R&I ecosystem would “not only help Europe to stay globally competitive but [could] also drive health and economic resilience, and ensure highly skilled jobs stay in the region”.

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This week: chemistry innovation, UK-Swiss collaboration, addressing regional disparities, defence technology loans, and more

UK Research and Innovation’s Funding Service website went down, causing stress for researchers ahead of multiple grant application deadlines.

Full story: UKRI grant applications hit by Funding Service glitch

UK science minister Patrick Vallance has reaffirmed the UK government’s support for the Ukrainian science community, saying international collaboration is integral to scientific success.

Full story: UK pledges more help for researchers in Ukraine

The Campaign for Science and Engineering has advised the new Labour government on the actions it should take in its first 100 days to support the research sector.

Full story: Case urges government to make early start on R&D

Here is the rest of the funding news this fortnight…

Royal Society of Chemistry names tech competition winners

The Royal Society of Chemistry has awarded £100,000 to four innovative projects, as part of its 2024 Emerging Technologies Competition. The winners include the University of Cambridge’s H2Upgrade, as well as ThioTech, Ignota Labs and Imperial College London. Their innovations address critical challenges, such as converting industrial waste to hydrogen, removing toxic residues from water, improving drug safety via artificial intelligence, and enhancing peptide synthesis. The competition aims to foster commercialisation and industry recognition for cutting-edge chemical science.

Innovate UK funds 26 UK-Switzerland collaborations

Innovate UK has awarded £7.8 million, alongside CHF 9.1m (£7.9m) from Swiss innovation body Innosuisse, to collaborations between researchers in the UK and Switzerland. The projects span life sciences, net zero, space technologies, quantum computing and medical technology. The initiative seeks to strengthen international partnerships, enhance industrial commercialisation and set global standards. Key projects include advancements in remote stroke diagnosis, home energy storage, and carbon capture, with the aim of driving mutual growth and innovation between the two nations.

UKRI awards £10m to regional disparity projects

UK Research and Innovation has awarded £9.7 million to 17 projects aimed at addressing regional disparities in economic success and wellbeing. Funded initiatives include evaluating free schools, the opportunity-areas programme, on-demand bus services for underserved communities, as well as the Sure Start scheme for supporting disadvantaged families. The projects will seek to provide evidence on effective interventions and guide policymakers to improve opportunities and outcomes across the UK.

Dasa launches SME defence-innovation loans

The Defence and Security Accelerator has launched defence-innovation loans for small and medium-sized enterprises. Supported by Innovate UK, the loans offer SMEs between £100,000 and £1 million at a 7.4 per cent interest rate. Past recipients have successfully leveraged the loans to secure further private investment and create jobs in defence innovation. Applications for the current cycle are open until 10 September.

New fellows announced for AMR push

The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation has funded a UK-Japan partnership to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The Institute of Development Studies named two infectious-disease experts as policy fellows who will receive the funding. The fellowships honour Sally Davies and Yasuhisa Shiozaki, both key figures in the global AMR effort. They will collaborate to develop new antibiotics and align policy objectives, with the aim of mitigating the global threat of AMR.

Aria launches funding call for robotics

UK funding body the Advanced Research and Invention Agency has launched a call for robotic innovation, called Smarter Robot Bodies. Up to £500,000 of funding is available to support bold, high-potential research in the field. The initiative seeks innovative ideas that leverage artificial intelligence, control, materials and manufacturing to enhance robotic capabilities. Early career individuals, as well as those with unconventional backgrounds, are encouraged to apply. Applications must be sent by 27 August.

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RPN webinar hears from policy experts on future of university funding, REF and OfS

Labour could still act to restrict the graduate route visa, despite signals of support for it from the education secretary, a former government adviser has warned.

Speaking at a webinar, After the Vote, held on 18 July by Research Professional News to discuss what the new government means for UK research, Diana Beech, chief executive of higher education umbrella body London Higher and a former adviser to three Conservative universities and science ministers, said “any further moves [on] immigration and the graduate route are not off the cards”.

She was speaking after education secretary Bridget Phillipson told the BBC’s World at One on 17 July that the government had no plans to ease the university funding crisis by raising tuition fees or increasing public funding, but that it backed international student recruitment to help put institutions “on a more sustainable footing”.

“We have the graduate route that has worked very successfully for universities,” Phillipson said.

But Beech pointed out that Phillipson is not the home secretary and that “the education secretary under the last government was batting our corner [while] the home secretary wasn’t”.

She said: “I think we should rehearse our arguments for the importance of the graduate route. I don’t think anything is off the table.”

Beech said the new government would not want to raise fees for home students because it would look like they were punishing the very people––younger age groups––who had just voted for them. Raising the amount of maintenance funding that students could borrow might be more likely, “but that’s going to take a couple of years”, she added.

Fostering ‘empathy’ between departments

Graeme Reid, chair of science and research policy at University College London, said at the webinar that he would like to see more efforts to address tensions between immigration and research policy, to “see if we can get more empathy between the Home Office and those departments that are invested in the science agenda”.

Martin McQuillan, editor of RPN’s 8am Playbook, suggested that if Phillipson was saying the government had no plans for an increase in funding, relying on international students was the only other option. However, “it is not going to be an easy thing for Labour to say that we are just going to take the lid off the graduate-visa route”, he added.

Labour’s opposition to raising tuition fees and its insistence that it did not want to be part of the Erasmus+ student exchange scheme were likely to be “positions that won’t bear contact with reality”, he argued.

Ten-year budgets

The webinar also discussed the new government’s proposal to extend R&D budgets to 10 years.

Kieron Flanagan, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Manchester, said this was not a new idea and that no government could bind the hands of its successor, but that it made sense to give a clear indication of the direction of travel.

“The intriguing thing is that there have been hints that it might apply to individual research institutes,” he said. “That might be a little bit newer in terms of the idea of, for instance, major research institutes having more certainty.”

Reid said it would be a mistake to view a 10-year budget settlement as necessarily an attractive option. “Presented differently, it sounds like a 10-year budget freeze,” he said.

In the lead up to the election, questions had been raised about the future of the Research Excellence Framework. Asked about this at RPN’s in-person event, RPN Live, in March, then shadow science secretary Chi Onwurah stopped short of committing to retain it in its current form and said she was concerned about some of the bureaucracy involved.

But Flanagan said the REF fulfilled an important need to generate a figure for quality-related funding, while Reid said it was valuable in providing different incentives for researchers, such as in terms of impact or research culture, and was an asset to the UK internationally.

McQuillan said the appointment of former government chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance as science minister made it more likely that the REF would be retained.

Improving regulation

Also under discussion was the future of higher education regulator the Office for Students. Phillipson said in her interview that the government had already started work on improving regulation. “The Office for Students, for example, we’ve begun to make changes there because the system we have had hasn’t delivered,” she said.

Smita Jamdar, relationship partner for education clients at the law firm Shakespeare Martineau, said there were questions around whether the OfS had suitable expertise on its board.

Questions also remained about new statutory duties around academic freedom, due to come into force on 1 August, and whether that was a viable date, she added.

Universities still had no idea what the complaints committee would look like or how the OfS would make its judgments, according to Jamdar.

“Something has to happen about that start date,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll just have chaos for a few weeks, and that is not a great way to start a new system.”

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Vallance plan to explore hosting major facility may meet Treasury opposition, former STFC head warns

The UK could reap big economic benefits by hosting a major new international research facility, according to a former chief executive of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, after new science minister Patrick Vallance floated the idea.

John Womersley, who is also a special adviser at the University of Edinburgh, spoke to Research Professional News after comments made by Vallance, the former government chief scientific adviser appointed as science minister in Keir Starmer’s Labour government, at a recent meeting of G7 research ministers.

Vallance “suggested the UK will continue to review the possibility to host a new international research facility as part of the global effort to drive innovation through international collaboration in science and technology”, according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Examples of such a facility include Cern, Iter and Ska (for which the UK already hosts science astronomy megaproject, the Square Kilometre Array).

“The reasons to host such a facility would be to bring economic benefits to the UK and attract excellent human capital,” Womersley told RPN. “The running costs of a facility tend to end up in the local economy,” he added. This “fits in well with attracting the best minds to the UK economy, as well as with the idea of levelling up”, he continued.

Womersley explained that Vallance’s idea was not a new one and many previous science ministers had proposed it, but that its implementation is a case of convincing the Treasury. Yet it is an idea that’s “not always in good favour” with the Treasury, he continued, partly as it is “easy to make the case that it’s cheaper for the taxpayer to be part of somebody else’s hosted project”.

Building a major global research facility has a “slower payoff than simply, for example, building infrastructure, building roads and houses and schools”, Womersley pointed out. “It’s a more sustainable investment because it attracts R&D-intensive, higher-paid jobs, and it attracts a cluster of high-tech companies around it”, which are all “very good things”, he said.

Biomedical and physical sciences

Areas of science that the UK has a strong background in, and could potentially host such a facility in, are biomedical sciences and the physical sciences, Womersley said.

He thought Vallance may end up pursuing something like the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Europe’s life science laboratory—an international governmental organisation headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and with five other sites including Cambridge, UK.

Although, currently, Womersley pointed out, “there aren’t a lot of global initiatives looking for someone to put a lot of money on the line to secure a headquarters”. But, he said, there is one exception: the possibly of hosting a large next-generation search for dark matter in an underground lab.

“The STFC are interested in the possibility of the UK hosting a large generation search for dark matter underground as it is physics research that won’t require a particle accelerator,” explained Womersley. A particle accelerator is a hugely expensive piece of scientific kit, in which Cern, the Switzerland-headquartered European organisation for nuclear research, has invested.

Another potential option, Womersley suggested, is that there could be scope for international collaboration on an existing UK project such as the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, a programme aiming to demonstrate the ability to create net energy from fusion. “This could bring in additional intellectual capacity and resources to an existing UK initiative,” he added.

Location, location, location

When deciding a location for a facility of this type, there are tensions between levelling up economically, alongside the good skills and transport links needed for research, Womersley explained.

“The scientific community want good schools for their children. They want good transport links. They want connectivity with good universities,” said Womersley. 

One recent example that the government could look to, he added, is why the Ska project ended up in Manchester. “It ended up there because Manchester is a sort of a reasonable compromise, a workable compromise within the UK geography… outside London while still badged as the North. But it is a place with a globally recognised university, with international transport links, and with good schools and housing and good education.”

Patience is key

Womersley explained that the idea of hosting a major international research facility had been “hindered in the past by short four-year political cycles”. But he remains sure, despite hurdles, that this still is an idea worth pursuing, though, “as with all international projects you must go through a lot of scientific diplomacy”.

Womersley is convinced Vallance is “an extremely good person” to deal with this, though he warned that it “gets frustrating for the government that wants to be able to demonstrate progress on an electorally relevant timescale to be going what seems like endlessly around the loops of trying to get international agreement on hosting a facility”.

The post Global research centre could be ‘economic boost for UK’ appeared first on Research Professional News.

National grants programme run by Australian Research Council needs a full redesign, review told

The humanities should get a more “equitable” share of Australian research funding, the Australian Academy of the Humanities has said.

In its submission to the Australian Research Council’s review of its grants programme, the academy said “the ARC is the only source of government funding for basic research in the humanities and the primary source of industry-related collaborative funding”.

However, the “one-size-fits-all approach” taken in the council’s Discovery funding programme for fundamental research “has inflated the cost of humanities research while supporting a shrinking number of projects and individual researchers”.

The academy called for a total redesign of the council’s grants programme, saying it is “skewed” to favour “the sciences”.

It also said that “the expanded focus on the track record of the investigator is effectively shutting out early career researchers”.

Humanities, arts and social science researchers have a success rate of only 5 per cent in the ARC’s Laureate fellowships programme, the academy said, and the Centres of Excellence programme is weighted heavily against the humanities because of its “design, scale and assessment assumptions”.

Full range of research

Years of changes have created a set of funding schemes in need of a “first principles” review, the academy said. “The creation and dissemination of new knowledge has slipped off the policy agenda for research funding in recent years.”

Its submission criticised the focus on commercialisation of research, saying it would be more useful to focus on “the uses made” of new knowledge.

Any new scheme “must incorporate the necessary flexibility to include particular research practices across the full range of fields of research”.

“If the ARC wishes to support research in the humanities, it must do more to tailor its programmes in ways that acknowledge and facilitate excellent research in the humanities.”

A new scheme should work to reduce “unconscious bias” in assessment of grant applications, possibly by first assessing the projects “blind” before looking at the people and institutions involved, it said.

The post ARC funding ‘skewed’ against humanities, academy says appeared first on Research Professional News.

This week: spinout help, Nature strikes end, foreign investment warning and more

Nature strikes end

Springer Nature’s London staff have called off further planned strikes after reaching an agreement with the journal publisher, averting the threat of disruption to one of science’s leading publications. The journal’s staff, who are members of the National Union of Journalists, had been striking over a pay dispute, which has now ended with a two-year settlement. The NUJ branch had previously warned of “major disruption” to the next issue of Nature if the strike continued. The details of the new settlement have not been disclosed. But the NUJ and Springer Nature issued a joint statement last week, saying they were “pleased to have reached an agreement which ends our pay dispute through a two-year settlement and would like to pay tribute to the mutual efforts that helped us find a way forward”.  

Full story

Net zero challenge

The Confederation of British Industry has set out a five-point plan for economic growth based on environmentally sustainable policies. In a speech made before the general election, Rain Newton-Smith, chief executive of the employers’ organisation, urged the next UK government to show greater confidence in public acceptance of a green agenda. She complained that, in the run-up to the election, there had been a “deafening silence” from all the main political parties about the issues of climate change, biodiversity loss and net zero. In contrast, she said her organisation’s member companies have fully embraced the case for a new approach to an environmentally sustainable business model and have recognised the growth opportunities that it will provide. “We must join the global race for cheaper, more reliable, more efficient energy…there are huge emerging markets for new technologies,” she said.  

Full story

Economic growth focus ‘needed’

The new UK government should strengthen the country’s R&D sector and focus support on specific areas for economic growth, according to the National Centre for Universities and Business. The NCUB published its recommendations in the lead-up to the general election on 4 July. It called for innovation to be central to the next government’s long-term economic plan and highlighted risks to UK R&D leadership resulting from policy turmoil in recent years. Joe Marshall, the group’s chief executive, said: “The UK’s universities and businesses are a national asset” but “declining private investment in research, successive policy changes and acute skills challenges threaten international competitiveness, business performance and national growth”. He added: “The next government has the opportunity to address the challenges that threaten UK innovation, and create a bold and positive plan for the future.”

Full story

Universities ‘key to prosperity’

The next government must work with universities to boost local growth and prosperity, the chief executive of the Russell Group has said. Speaking as the group of research-intensive institutions published a report highlighting how universities are an asset to their local communities, chief executive Tim Bradshaw said universities are an “intrinsic part of the social and cultural fabric of their places”. “If the next government wants to follow through on promises of local growth and prosperity, it should look to the universities who are already there on the ground, re-energising communities and laying the foundations for success,” Bradshaw said. The report looks at how Russell Group member institutions are making an impact in regions across the UK, from boosting health and wellbeing to improving access to arts and culture. In 2022-23, more than eight million people attended free events and exhibitions hosted by Russell Group universities, it says.

Full story

Spinout help

Universities need “help at the other end of the pipeline” from the next government to make spinout companies successful and drive economic growth, according to University of Oxford vice-chancellor Irene Tracey, who co-authored a government-commissioned review of university spinouts published in November 2023. Ministers accepted the recommendations of the review, which included a call for additional funds to increase movement of people between academia and industry. Speaking at a Westminster Higher Education Forum event on 27 June, Tracey said that UK universities are “doing our bit pretty well” by generating new ideas through research, which can then be commercialised. She added: “Now we need whoever comes into government in the foreseeable future to think about how they can help us at their end of the pipeline, so that we can together take this country forward in growth and prosperity.”

Full story

Lab management secrets

A clear management strategy plays a critical role in producing major scientific breakthroughs, a study of the UK’s prizewinning Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge has found. The study, which was published by scientific journal Nature, analysed the Medical Research Council’s famed laboratory. The LMB lab is known as the ‘Nobel Prize factory’ for having produced a dozen Nobel Prize winners, including James Watson, Francis Crick, and Fred Sanger. Authors of the study identified the lab’s management model as key to the lab’s success. “The success of research-intensive institutions depends on more than funding and can benefit from tailored management of the culture and mission of the institution,” said Cambridge professor Antonio Vidal-Puig, a co-author of the study with Cambridge professor Chandler Velu and Luka Gebel, a PhD candidate at King’s Business School.

Full story

AI efficiency boost

Artificial intelligence technologies could massively increase the efficiency of R&D and help to stimulate economic growth, according to a study in the journal Research Policy. The paper by Neil Thompson and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s FutureTech initiative—a multidisciplinary group examining the impact of advances in computing on society—said a key lesson from the study is that generating ideas using AI requires a greater capital investment in computing power than traditional R&D. Increasing the capital intensity of R&D then accelerates other investments, which make scientists and engineers more productive, and means that AI-augmented R&D has the potential to speed up technological change and economic growth, the authors explained.

Full story

Picture of the week

Image: Number 10 [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0], via Flickr

Graduate employment up

The graduate employment rate in England has surpassed pre-pandemic levels following three years of increases, official statistics have shown. According to Department for Education data published on 27 June, the rate was 87.7 per cent in 2023—up from 87.3 per cent the previous year, 86.6 per cent in 2021 and 86.3 per cent in 2020. In 2019, the year before the Covid outbreak, the graduate employment rate was 87.5 per cent. More than two-thirds of graduates (67 per cent) were in high-skilled employment, up 0.3 percentage points year on year. Some 78.9 per cent of graduates with a postgraduate qualification were in high-skilled roles, compared with just 23.7 per cent of people without a degree.

Full story

Postgrad payout

A UK higher education institution was ordered to pay compensation to a PhD student who was left without a supervisory team for four months after their supervisor was made redundant. A case study published by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education on 26 June shows that the student was then not satisfied that their new supervisors had sufficient expertise and asked for their former supervisor to be involved in overseeing their work. The unnamed institution rejected the concerns but accepted that there had been a delay. It offered an apology, some compensation and a refund of fees for the unsupervised months, but the student remained dissatisfied and complained to the OIA. “We partly upheld the complaint,” the OIA said. “We couldn’t comment on whether the new supervisory team had enough specific subject knowledge to supervise the student, because this decision involves academic judgment.”

Full story

The post What’s going on in the UK: 27 June to 10 July appeared first on Research Professional News.

Sector welcomes Dsit’s focus on economy and says universities can emerge as driver of growth

R&D must be seen as central to the Labour government’s policy priority of driving economic growth, research policy leaders have urged.

Following last week’s general election victory, Keir Starmer’s government has set out its ambitions to grow the economy and jobs, and sector experts expect R&D to be seen as playing a key part in that policy mission.

“Labour has already set out an ambitious mission approach to government with science, innovation, and technology as the driver for economic transformation,“ Joe Marshall, chief executive of the National Centre for Universities and Business, told Research Fortnight.

As part of its wider plan, the government has said it will refocus the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

“Dsit will now become an economic department,” said science secretary Peter Kyle on 8 July.

Dsit also announced that “transforming public services and fuelling economic growth through science and technology will be the defining mission of a revamped department”.

Regional growth

In an opinion piece for Research Professional News following the election, Richard Jones, vice-president for regional innovation and civic engagement at the University of Manchester, one of the most influential voices on R&D and the regions, highlighted new chancellor Rachel Reeves’ focus on industrial strategy and on driving productivity in the regions.

“Universities need to be at the heart of this,” he wrote. “The pressure will be on, not just to produce more spinouts and to work with industry, but to support the diffusion of innovation across regional economies.”

Jones stressed the need for the Labour government to address the university funding crisis, as an “immediate shadow lying over UK public sector research and innovation”.

One way universities could catalyse economic growth in local regions is to start venture capital firms, said Martin Turner, associate director of policy, public affairs and investor relations at the UK Bioindustry Association.

He gave an example of Midlands Mindforge, a patient capital investment company co-funded by eight research-intensive universities. This firm provides capital and company-building skills to university spinouts, giving them access to investment, “which is really positive”, Turner said.

“It would be great to see more initiatives like this and to see government-funded investment in university venture capital firms”, he told Research Fortnight.

Others have welcomed Dsit’s rhetoric so far, but want to see delivery on the specifics.

‘Historical disconnect’

Sara Brigden, the managing director at ForrestBrown R&D tax credit consultancy, told Research Fortnight that Kyle’s announcement about focusing the department on the economy is “encouraging for businesses investing in R&D”.

But she maintained that this would need to be supported by addressing the “historical disconnect” between R&D tax policy and its implementation. The Tory government’s recent reforms of the tax credit system have been criticised by some for discouraging innovation.

Chancellor announcement

Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves made her first speech as chancellor, outlining plans to launch a new National Wealth Fund “with a remit to invest—and so to catalyse private sector investment—in new and growing industries”.

Under the plans, the new fund will bring together key institutions and a “compelling proposition for investors” that the Treasury expects “will mobilise billions more in private investment and generate a return for taxpayers”.

On 9 July, Reeves pledged £7.3bn of additional funding to the UK Infrastructure Bank via the fund so “investments can start being made immediately, focusing on further priority sectors and catalysing private investment at an even greater scale”. The priority areas include green technologies.

‘Long-term thinking’

Turner told Research Fortnight that he felt “confident” from what Reeves, Kyle and other ministers have said that Labour is including a focus on science and technology in their growth plans.

He said, for example, that he saw a clear link between Reeves’ recent speech on the importance of stability and long-term investment decisions being at the heart of their economic strategy and Labour’s plans for long-term R&D 10-year budgets, previously outlined in the party’s manifesto.

Turner added: “The science community should all be echoing back what Labour has said about the importance of research, development, and long-term thinking.”

The post R&D ‘at the heart of Labour’s growth mission’ appeared first on Research Professional News.

Former Ucas head says appointment shows government is aware of the challenges facing higher education

The appointment of former home secretary Jacqui Smith to the post of universities minister could indicate a “gargantuan” overhaul of further and higher education is on the cards, according to sector figures.

The new Labour government said that Smith’s brief will include universities, although at time of writing final details of her responsibilities had yet to be confirmed. To carry out the role, Smith will receive a peerage and operate from the House of Lords—meaning she will not be able to respond directly to questions about her brief in the House of Commons.

Smith’s appointment came as a surprise, with many in the sector expecting to see Matt Western—who had been serving as shadow universities minister for more than three years before Labour’s landslide general election victory—to be given the job.

It has led to suggestions that prime minister Keir Starmer believes an experienced political figure such as Smith, who became the UK’s first female home secretary in 2007 and has also served as schools minister, is required to oversee change.

‘Task not just about funding’

“This appointment was out of kilter with the continuity vibe that has underpinned most of the government roles, perhaps indicating that the government gets that there is a gargantuan task ahead to sort out higher education and further education,” said Mary Curnock Cook, former chief executive of Ucas and chair of the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology.

“The task is not just about funding—urgent though that is—but systemic too, with the focus likely to be on the contribution tertiary education can make to productivity and growth.”

Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, told Research Fortnight that, as a former home secretary, Smith “will know how to get Whitehall to bend to her will”—but expressed concern that she might have been given the role because Starmer “had so little idea of what to do” with higher education policy.

“It is also possible that Smith’s time in the Home Office may have given her an unhelpful view on the role of international students, given that the Home Office has displayed a very consistent opposition to sensible student migration rules,” Hillman added.

‘Big-hitting’ minister

Diana Beech, chief executive of London Higher and a former advisor to Conservative universities ministers, said universities now had “an experienced and ‘big-hitting’ minister responsible for their future”.

However, she expressed concern that while there would be plenty of scrutiny in the Lords, a “vacuum of debate” may be created in the Commons should a democratically elected MP not be selected to support Smith in her ministerial brief.

“With 412 MPs, many of whom represent constituencies with university seats, the Labour government could risk creating a rod for its own back if it does not allow pertinent issues around higher education to be debated in the Commons by a minister on top of the brief,” Beech said.

Smith will serve under education secretary Bridget Phillipson, who—unlike Western—retained the brief that she had held in Labour’s pre-election shadow ministerial team. In the build-up to the vote, Phillipson said universities would be a “day one priority” for a Labour administration.

The post Jacqui Smith’s university brief could spell ‘gargantuan’ changes appeared first on Research Professional News.

Fight for Sight has refocused its Small Grants on early career researchers and patient benefit

Top tips

• Be clear on the path forwards for your research upon completion of the Small Grant.
• Make sure you have a strong team around you.
• Even for lab-based projects, try to involve patients.
• Consult the guidance carefully and read the charity’s updated research strategy.

Fight for Sight is the UK’s leading specialist vision research charity, and its Small Grants have helped spur research ideas and careers for many years.

The grants are intended for applicants to collect preliminary data to bolster subsequent bids for larger follow-on funding in vision research. They open annually and provide up to £15,000 for projects of up to one year. The deadline for this year’s competition is 24 July.

The charity runs its Small Grants with highlight notices jointly supported by other charities. Participating in the current round are the Azoor Society (for acute zonal occult outer retinopathy research), the British and Irish Orthoptic Society, the Birdshot Uveitis Society, the Bowman Club, Debra (for epidermolysis bullosa research), Glaucoma UK, the Thyroid Eye Disease Charitable Trust and Versus Arthritis. Fight for Sight also welcomes submissions that fall within its remit alone.

Grants manager Steven Smith explains how the Small Grants work and what applicants can do to give their bids the best chance of success.

We last spoke with Fight for Sight in 2019, what changes have there been since then?

Fight for Sight has since merged with the Vision Foundation. The Vision Foundation was a London-based charity interested in social change, and therefor focused on the actual benefits to people with visual impairments. As a result, we now fund work concerned with how we can use research to benefit outcomes for patients and improve quality of life.

How else has this affected the research you fund?

The research we fund remains mostly within what might be called discovery science—so before the translational stage—but nonetheless now takes into greater consideration the rest of the pipeline. Lots of our projects, including the Small Grants, are focused on how to move ‘blue sky’ ideas into de-risked situations, so they can be taken forward and have a benefit for patients.

We’ve just released our new five-year research strategy—it’s on our website and I highly recommend people have a look at it before applying. The framework we now use very much follows the patient pathway.

Has it affected who you fund?

The charity is increasingly interested in capacity building, and this is particularly true regarding the Small Grants, which have changed focus to become more supportive of people earlier in their careers.

How do you define early career, and do you still accept Small Grants bids from more senior researchers?

Our definition of an early career researcher aligns closely with the Medical Research Council’s—it is given in full on our website. 

We are happy for more senior researchers to apply with rare-disease projects, but they must justify doing so, and that justification will be scrutinised. My personal advice to senior researchers is to ask whether they could put forward an early career researcher from their lab to lead on the project, to try and encourage that next generation. There’s nothing stopping the more senior researcher being a collaborator or co-applicant.

How do the joint grants with partner charities work in practice?

Our partner organisations match-fund the amount that we put in—so it’s half and half. From the point of view of the applicant, there’s a drop down-menu on the application form, where they should specify which partner call they are applying to. If they don’t specify, and we notice a bid is aligned with one of the joint calls, we may get in touch and ask if they don’t mind us sharing the application with the partner. All applicants to the partner calls should keep in mind the need to meet the remit of the relevant partner as well as our own. However, the remits tend to be fairly broad.

How many Small Grants do you tend to award?

This information is now on our website. Last year—2023-24—our success rate was 63 per cent and we awarded roughly a dozen Small Grants. But for each round it’s dependent on the quality and number of applications.

We do set a potential budget in advance and we would like to award one grant in each partnership, and at least a couple of our own. If you are applying for a grant in partnership with one of our partners and they can only support one, you’re not disadvantaged, because you will still be compared across the whole scheme. Sometimes, if the quality is there and if both partners can agree, we will fund multiple partnership grants when we’d expected to only fund one.

Are there any eligibility criteria you’d like to flag up?

The topline advice for this would be to check on the website where we do have a very detailed guidance section that sets out the remit and eligibility, also bearing in mind that some partners have different allowances to others. Our grants team also welcomes any queries. We often get questions from PhD students, who want to apply while they’re still completing their PhD. Our usual guidance is that you need to already have your PhD, and such people are often advised to hold fire for that round. However with good support from a mentor or institution, then a degree of flexibility may come into play.

In terms of costs, are there any potential eligibility issues?

With Small Grants now focusing on early careers, we do get questions about the salary. But with £15,000 you’re not likely to be covering a postdoc’s yearly salary. The intention is that the money is used to get the consumables and perhaps additional temporary support—maybe a statistician or technician on a couple of hours a week for a couple of months.

Beyond excellent science, what other characteristics will a strong Small Grant application have?

The clearest thing that I can advise applicants here relates to the path of progression for the research—knowing exactly what the desired Small Grant outcome is which will build towards a follow-on application. You’re in a good place if you know that, for example, you’re ultimately aiming for a project grant and you’ve got, say, two different models that you could use in that grant but you don’t know which is better. You want to use your Small Grant to resolve that issue, and you express that clearly.

What frequent mistakes crop up on bids?

One recurrent weakness, especially for applications that involve our partner charities, is a lack of a multidisciplinary approach, failing to identify collaborators of potential partners. It’s vital that applicants have the right support team around them. Therefore, I’d advise careful consideration of who’s involved in the project and why. A multidisciplinary team with relevant experience will always be pleasing from a funder’s perspective. This definitely applies to those who are new to vision research; it would be very hard to move into a field without the support of someone who knows it intimately.

Do you accept bids that put engineering and physical sciences upfront?

Yes, and there are examples in our portfolio that do so, especially in corneal research. We would certainly encourage bids from those fields where appropriate, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, if that can unlock discoveries.

What are your requirements for patient participation and involvement and engagement (PPIE)?

PPIE is a genuine focus for the charity and applications are very strongly encouraged to include meaningful PPIE. For laboratory research we know that will be harder than in a pilot study working with a handful of patients. But even if, for example, you’re doing fundamental research for a potential gene therapy, you should consider how that may affect patients, perhaps taking into account the delivery mechanism. Any patient input that can help shape that thinking early on would be advisable.

If your university has links to a National Institute for Health and Care Research Support Service, then we would advise consulting with them. We know this might be considered as extra work, but it is never acceptable to say that PPIE is just ‘not applicable’ to a bid. There must be some form of consideration of the patient perspective.

This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com

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Arma 2024: opportunities abound and research office staff should feel confident to seize them

Getting published is not just the preserve of researchers. Forays into writing for professional publications can reap benefits and advance the wider community of research managers and administrators (RMAs) too.

Such was the consensus view of panellists at a session during the Association of Research Managers and Administrators’ annual conference in Brighton on 18 June. What’s more, as chair and panellist, Sarah Richardson, editor-in-chief of Research Professional News, told attendees, many opportunities are available for RMAs to write and get published.

All the same, the panellists noted that the world of publishing may seem forbidding to many. A key goal of the session was therefore to share pointers for RMAs keen to publish their experiences and knowledge. Here are the five top tips that emerged.

1. Knowledge should be shared

The panel first looked at the reasons for RMAs to get into writing. According to Chloe Jeffries, head of strategic funding at the University of Manchester, who writes for Arma’s membership publication, Arma Insights, one reason is to showcase what you know about an area and share your expertise with a wider audience. “It will raise your profile to people outside of your institution,” she cited as an added benefit.

Oonagh Collins, the Euraxess UK programme manager at the British Council, built on this by encouraging RMAs to hold on to thoughts like “why haven’t I seen anything about this” for inspiration as to what to write.

She said: “If you are thinking this, there will be an audience of people for what you are saying.” It therefore follows that there is an opportunity to fill publication gaps with your knowledge.

Richardson highlighted that “no one is a better expert on your own experience than you are”. Several publications, including Arma Insights, greatly value research managers giving their opinions and sharing their experiences. “An example of this in Research Professional News was a piece written by Pauline Muya [former director of research services at the University of Leicester, and now independent consultant] reflecting on her career in research management, which did really well,” she noted.

Christopher Daley, head of evidence and analysis at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who writes for LSE’s Impact Blog, concluded that “research managers are at the intersection between professional services and academia, so they have the perfect knowledge blend to comment on research and innovation as a whole”. All panellists encouraged more RMAs to get involved. 

2. Cater to your chosen publication

The panel’s consensus was that budding writers should look at what the publication is looking for before contacting them and making their pitches. For instance, Alicen Nickson, director of research and innovation at Cranfield University, said that the Journal of Research Management and Administration, which she has published in, is looking for 3,000-to-8,000-word pieces, so writers should pitch longer, evidence-based pieces. Daley said that the journal Public Humanities, where he is an advisory board member, is “happy to receive pitches for 4,000-to-5,000-word journal articles, but also shorter opinion pieces as well”.

On choosing which publication to write for, Nickson said “the more you read, the more you understand what publications are looking for and if your writing would be suited to them”.

Richardson then pointed out that it is always worth contacting editors before writing your piece, as “then they can work with you to help guide it”.

3. Be confident

Discussing what holds RMAs back from writing, Daley said: “I don’t think people have the confidence to write opinion pieces about overcoming challenges brought about by research policy changes”. He went on to discuss a successful piece he wrote six years ago on overcoming challenges that were a result of open access requirements in the Research Excellence Framework. “Don’t be afraid to articulate your opinions,” he said.

Richardson added that “people may be worried about sticking their head above parapet in the age of social media”, but “people shouldn’t be put off using their professional expertise to make an informed argument”.

4. Take your time 

But there was another significant barrier to RMAs writing, the panellists agreed—finding the time to do it in. However, this need not be the barrier many felt it to be. Jeffries pointed out that for Arma Insights, “although writing should be topical and timely, there’s no pressure to ‘break scoops’”, which she said relieves time pressure for budding writers. Richardson quipped that if research managers did have a scoop, then they could always contact the reporting team at Research Professional News.

Collins added that there was “no time pressure” for those wanting to submit to Euraxess UK, which publishes once a month. She encouraged RMAs to email if they had a topic in mind.

Of course, some publications do run on a tight schedule, and the LSE’s Impact blog is one of these, said Daley. As its name suggests, it seeks topical and impactful pieces that will grab attention and generate clicks. “You will work with a managing editor on a rapid publication process,” he said.

5. Work collaboratively

Another aspect agreed upon by all panellists was that the best writing is produced in collaboration with others. Nickson gave the example of “working collaboratively on a literature review looking at the landscape of research management” as one particularly fulfilling project she had worked on. She also praised the Arma network for being very reliable, collaborative and willing to engage with others.

Jeffries concluded that “this panel demonstrates that there are real people doing this” and she urged attendees to “not hesitate to get in touch”.

This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com

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Back page gossip from the 10 July issue of Research Fortnight

Speedy start for Labour

Labour clearly wants to be seen as having a speedy start, so it was fitting that one of Peter Kyle’s first duties as science secretary was to hand the winner’s trophy to Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone on Sunday.

“F1 drives innovation, creates incredible high-skilled jobs and boosts our reputation around the world,” said Kyle. 

US learnings, and pay negotiations

The Higher Education Policy Institute has published a report on what we can learn from US universities.

The paper is written by Nicholas W. Hillman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education, who does not appear to be any relation to Hepi director Nick Hillman. We would like to see photographic evidence, though, to reassure us about the Hepi man’s transatlantic nominative doppelganger.

Also out is the news that this year’s university pay round negotiations are complete—at least for now. The Universities and Colleges Employers Association has announced, “the employers’ final offer results in pay of between 2.5 per cent to 5.7 per cent alongside a review of the pay spine and joint work on contract types, workload and pay gaps”.

Most folks will be at the 2.5 per cent end of that deal. Ucea says all staff will receive a £900 uplift from 1 August 2024.

Ucea’s statement added: “Then, from 1 March 2025, the remaining, full salary increase will be applied. The pay uplift is weighted towards the lower end of the pay spine (pay point 5), where a maximum of just over 5.7 per cent (5.74 per cent for accuracy) is applied. This percentage gradually tapers to 2.5 per cent from pay point 38. As a result, employees earning up to £38,205 will receive an uplift of over 3 per cent.”

Ucea chief executive Raj Jethwa called it, “a realistic but fair pay offer”, adding, “we urge the trade unions to now consult fairly if that remains in their procedures. I would remind the unions that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”

In October, the University and College Union failed to win sufficient backing from its members to renew a legal mandate to pursue strike action over pay and conditions. A UCU spokesperson said the union’s Higher Education Committee would meet this Friday to consider the latest offer.

Biology Matters—the latest

The think tank Policy Exchange has published the latest edition of its Biology Matters newsletter, which “systematically documents the adoption of gender identity beliefs in the public sphere”.

Latest developments recorded in the newsletter include: new guidance from the Office for Students on freedom of speech, issued in March, that would specifically protect gender-critical speech; an apology in May from the Russell Group after it “incorrectly” listed gender-critical rather than transphobic speech as an example of unlawful speech; and legal guidance for the charity Sex Matters suggesting that King’s College London may have broken equality law in requiring applicants for promotion to demonstrate their support of the university’s equality, diversity and inclusion ambitions.

Elsewhere, Policy Exchange has relaunched its confidential hotline on which people can “share their experiences and concerns about the ways in which gender identity ideology is being adopted in the public sphere”.

Lara Brown and Zachary Marsh, authors of the latest newsletter, say the Biology Matters project was launched to catalogue the number of changes that had been made in public policy in response to transgender issues. They add that the think tank “does not offer any judgment on the actions of the individual or institution in question, today or in the past”.

Meanwhile, they welcome the fact that all the major parties have offered “serious proposals in their manifestos on the issue of trans and gender”—and they say that, thanks to recent interventions by author JK Rowling, and the fact that those once “cowed into silence” are now speaking out, these issues can no longer be relegated to the status of a “culture war”. Over to Labour.

After the vote

Join us on Thursday, 18 July, for Research Professional News’ live webinar, After the Vote, asking what a new government means for UK research.

Speakers at the webinar, addressing issues including everything from the financial health of the sector to research and innovation priorities and the policy direction of the new government, will include: Diana Beech, chief executive of London Higher; Kieron Flanagan, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Manchester; Smita Jamdar, relationship partner for education clients at the law firm Shakespeare Martineau; Daniel Rathbone, deputy executive director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering; Graeme Reid, chair of science and research policy at University College London; and Playbook’s own Martin McQuillan.

The webinar is free to attend.

The post The third degree: Labour’s fast start and lessons from the US appeared first on Research Professional News.

Former chief scientific adviser brings overview of research and innovation “beyond any scientist or politician”

The Labour government’s surprise appointment of Patrick Vallance as a minister has been seen as a boost to the “political significance of science” that could also help unleash its full economic power.

The choice of Vallance—a former government chief scientific adviser, president of R&D at pharmaceutical giant GSK and head of UCL’s department of medicine—as science minister was part of a pattern of appointments made by Keir Starmer after Labour’s landslide election victory. In several instances, the new prime minister opted for experts from beyond the ranks of his MPs.

With Vallance having worked at the highest levels in science, government and private sector R&D, one senior sector figure suggested he had been chosen as “the ultimate boundary-spanner”.

Vallance will be made a peer, allowing him to serve as minister under Peter Kyle, the new secretary of state in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Dsit).

In his role as chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, Vallance helped to set up the country’s Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce, widely considered to be a successful example of bringing in private expertise for public benefit.

‘Signal to all parts of government’

Graeme Reid, chair of science and research policy at UCL, told Research Fortnight that Vallance’s appointment “sends a signal to all parts of government about the importance that the prime minister attaches to science, innovation and technology”.

He added: “It is clear that Labour wish to harness the economic potential of the UK’s strong science base. With Patrick Vallance as science minister, I expect a sophisticated implementation of that agenda, embracing a wide range of economic opportunities rather than, for example, obsessing about spinout companies.

“For example, the UK’s exceptionally strong research universities are one of the things that attracts so much R&D investment from global business—many with headquarters in other countries.”

‘Unique breadth of expertise

Others highlighted the fact that Vallance’s experience gives him an overview of research and innovation systems beyond that of any MP.

“I think he’s been appointed because of the unique breadth of his expertise,” said Kieron Flanagan, a professor of science and technology policy at the University of Manchester. He added that Vallance’s experience means that he “has a better view of the UK science and innovation system, as a system, than any scientist or politician would have”.

Vallance joins a Labour government whose pre-election R&D plans focused on introducing long-term 10-year budgets for key institutions.

And he joins a department that Kyle wants to turn into a driver of growth and improved public services, as part of Labour’s primary focus on economic growth.

‘Driving force’

Mary Ryan, vice-provost for research and enterprise and professor of materials science at Imperial College London, said: “Science and technology will be vital to ensuring the government’s mission to deliver sustained economic growth succeeds, and [Vallance] will be fantastically placed to help take this agenda forward.”

Martin Smith, head of Wellcome’s policy lab, said Vallance “understands the global significance of the UK’s strength in science and the importance of research to the UK’s role in the world, as well as its economy at home”.

“He was the driving force behind the strong role for science in the 2021 Integrated Review [of security, defence and foreign policy], and it gives us hope that the political significance of science will be maintained,” Smith added.

‘A very interesting surprise’

But given Vallance’s lack of ministerial experience, his appointment has surprised many.

Stephen Curry, consul and professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, and director of strategy at the Research on Research Institute, said “Vallance’s appointment was a very interesting surprise”, but a “positive move”.

He would like to see Vallance find an early opportunity to make a speech explaining his new role and outlining what his approach and priorities will be. “I’m sure he has a clear understanding of the difference between being a government adviser and a minister,” Curry said.

Diana Beech, chief executive of higher education umbrella body London Higher, and a former adviser to Conservative universities ministers, suggested that while the appointment sent all the right signals to the UK research community that the new government was taking science seriously, it was not without risk.

“The decisions he will have to take as a minister will inevitably involve trade-offs and a willingness to compromise, should the politics require it,” she said. 

Another surprise to the sector that Flanagan highlighted was the lack of a ministerial role as yet for Chi Onwurah, formerly Labour’s shadow science minister, “who has held a shadow brief in the area for many years, on and off, and who knows the area very well”.

Meanwhile, Beech said that Vallance’s background in the so-called ‘hard’ sciences means his appointment “does nothing to soften the image” of Dsit, which “needs to embrace interdisciplinary research borne of the humanities, social sciences and the arts, as much as science and technology”.

Professor Reid said that “to make the most of our research base”, the new government should aim to “reconcile long-standing tensions between immigration policy and research policy; make the UK more welcoming to talented people from around the world who wish to study and do research at our institutions; and recognise the importance of a stable and predictable policy agenda”.

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With more constructive attention from Westminster, universities can support Starmer’s vision of national renewal

Keir Starmer promised the UK “national renewal” and a “reset” following Labour’s sweeping victory in last week’s general election. When it comes to the value placed on scientific research within government, that reset appears to have already begun, with Patrick Vallance given the role of science minister via a seat in the House of Lords.

The recruitment of the former government chief scientific adviser is one of several early moves by the new prime minister that signal his government will place much greater value on specialist expertise than its predecessor. For all those who had had quite enough of a culture war-driven agenda towards universities, this change of tack has not come a moment too soon. There will be sympathy for former shadow minister Chi Onwurah, who as Research Fortnight went to press was still awaiting news of any alternative ministerial role. But as someone who understands up close not only the value of evidence, but also the challenges in funding the research that produces it, Vallance will help bring a renewed sense of optimism over the willingness within Westminster to engage with the sector’s potential and its difficulties.

This is especially important now, when the challenges facing UK research, just like those facing the country at large, cannot be underestimated. Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff, has university financial stability on her list of crises threatening to erupt; it is now beyond argument that the funding system for higher education and, by extension, research, is broken. The Conservatives’ anti-immigration drives, in particular recent changes to visa rules, have piled on top of Brexit to create a situation in which many talented researchers and technicians from overseas are being effectively shut out of the UK.

Researchers are having to re-establish international ties with wary partners following the twin hits of a three-year lockout from Horizon Europe and having established aid-funded international research programmes decimated without warning by cuts to Official Development Assistance. Meanwhile, closer to home, the win of increased public investment in R&D under the last government has been severely eroded by inflation, and the longstanding ambition to better use universities as catalysts for regional growth has taken a battering, thanks to the loss of European Structural Funds for regional development and the lack of adequate replacement schemes.

All of this—beginning most urgently with university financing—is on the daunting pile of issues facing the new government, along with research bureaucracy and research security amid geopolitical unrest. But, crucially, as Richard Jones, vice-president for regional innovation and civic engagement at the University of Manchester, wrote for Research Professional News this week, universities must not be perceived as “only a problem to be fixed”.

The new government’s mission to pursue economic growth to drive up living standards in the UK offers a clear place at its heart for R&D. This has been explicitly recognised in Westminster, with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology announcing this week that it intends to “accelerate innovation, investment and productivity through world-class science and research across the economy,” and “ensure technologies are safely developed and deployed across the country, with the benefits more widely shared”.

Warm words over research’s place in economic growth are far from new, and time will tell if the new government can succeed in supporting the sector to play a pivotal role in this agenda better than its predecessor.

But the pledge of “benefits more widely shared” offers a beguiling sense that the ultimate prize of this approach—societal transformation—will be in much sharper focus. There is greater emphasis, greater urgency, towards better realising the research sector’s potential.

With this comes huge opportunity, and responsibility, for government and universities to work together to help bring about change.

The post Labour’s victory signals a reset for research appeared first on Research Professional News.

Retiring Manchester vice-chancellor embraces freedom to shape debate on future of universities and research

Nancy Rothwell has been too busy to think about her retirement in August after more than 40 years in higher education—14 of them as vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester.

There have been graduations and “a zillion” leaving dos to attend, honorary degrees to accept, an unveiling of her portrait, a civic dinner. She has also been preparing for the arrival of her successor, Duncan Ivison, a former deputy vice-chancellor for research at the University of Sydney, who will shadow her for a month before he begins his role. By the time we meet at 1.30pm, she has already emailed him three times that day.

Such intensity is in keeping with the character of Rothwell’s career. As an academic, she switched mid-career from researching metabolism and the causes of obesity to neuroscience and strokes.

And, as Rothwell tells Research Professional News, she aims to keep up the pace, hoping the end of her time as a vice-chancellor can free her to speak out on pressing issues for the future of universities and research.

Once she leaves, Rothwell says, she will continue serving on a few boards (including that of UK Biobank and others locally), take part in the university’s bicentenary celebrations, and is already exploring other opportunities.

She will definitely not be lazing around. “Anyone who knows me would know it wasn’t very likely,” Rothwell says.

Patrick Vallance, the former government chief scientific adviser and newly appointed science minister in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, with whom Rothwell co-chaired the Council for Science and Technology (CST) and who she helped appoint to the GCSA role, warned her on retirement: “Don’t accept everything at the beginning.” With that in mind, Rothwell has already said no to a few offers.

But she will also want to say yes to others and is looking forward to being able to speak her mind without being constrained by the political neutrality expected of a vice-chancellor. Rothwell says she has no interest in being a politician, but adds: “I think I could be in a position to be more of a spokesperson, if I’m asked to be. I think I could say what I think is good and not good.”

What exactly would she say on that?

“I’m not sure there’s been enough attention paid to the role of research and innovation in economic growth,” she says. “There are numerous international examples of it. You look at other countries with a high spend and, if you are a university vice-chancellor, that [calling for higher spending] sounds like special pleading, whereas if you’re slightly out of it, you can say, ‘Look, there is good economic evidence.’ I think that could be better done.”

Reviving technical training

Rothwell also feels that improvements could be made to vocational education, including apprenticeships, and that further education colleges have received too little attention. “I think there could be incentives for some universities, particularly ones—they used to be called polytechnics, of course—to go more down the technical training route and to incentivise that, because of course when [the polytechnics] became universities everyone wanted to be the same and do research, and we lost something in that.”

There are lots of other things she could talk about: further relaxation on pension funds so they could take a small amount of risk to invest in startup companies, international students… Spokesperson Rothwell would have a full agenda.

Having been involved in science communication throughout her career, communication is very much her thing. Rothwell cites the televised Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, which she gave in 1998 (on the physiological processes that help our bodies stay in balance), as one of her most cherished, if most challenging, achievements. She will help with the 200th anniversary of the lectures next year, including securing the lecturer, who has yet to be announced.

But communication has also proved frustrating at times. One of the things Rothwell has learned, and mentions a few times, is around barriers to communication. “I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter how much you communicate, there will be people who haven’t a clue about what’s going on, and probably don’t want to know, until it happens.”

Political pragmatism

Asked for any regrets from her time as a vice-chancellor, Rothwell does not cite sometimes difficult relations with staff—the university came out better than many from the recent marking and assessment boycott, she says, and almost all students were able to graduate with a classification.

Nor does she pick her handling of Manchester’s response to the pandemic, when some students held a vote of no confidence in her leadership after being confined behind fences to their halls of residence. Rothwell concedes they had it tough, but points to the fact that Covid-19 rates were high in the city for such a long time, and stresses she had not known about the fences prior to their being set up.

Instead, her regrets are mainly around not acting quickly enough; failing to be bold over campus moves in the Victoria University of Manchester’s merger with UMIST in 2004, when she was vice-president for research.

She has made a list for Ivison of what still needs to be pursued. “I’ve done a SWOT list for Duncan: these are all the really good things/these are the things you have to deal with.”

But she has also learned to acknowledge other points of view. “I’ve become a bit less impulsive,” she says. “You have to temper it a bit and realise there are nearly always lots of different sides to things that are quite difficult.”

This includes understanding where politicians are coming from. Her time at the CST taught her that what is scientifically logical may not always be politically realistic. “There are certain things you just cannot do politically,” Rothwell says. “I’ve talked to a lot of senior politicians who say, ‘Look, I know what you’re telling me, I completely agree, I just can’t deliver it.’”

Take higher education finance. She says there is a clear case for fees to increase, but recognises that raising them above £10,000 is likely to be politically impossible. “I think they’re going to have to [lift fees],” Rothwell says. “There is almost nothing else that has stayed flat for more than 10 years [although] I think they’d want to keep it below 10 [thousand].”

Institutions on the edge

Meanwhile, what really needs to change, Rothwell argues, is student maintenance.

She predicts (speaking prior to the election) that under the new government all this is likely to be referred to a commission for review, and suggests former Conservative universities minister David Willetts might be a good choice to head it.

The sector is offering cause for concern, she says. “I’m hearing a few pretty bad stories. And I would not be surprised if there was either a bailout or a failure or some significant mergers in the next year or two.”

For Rothwell, given the political constraints on raising fees and the difficulties of bailing out universities amid competing demands from other sectors, mergers would be the best option “because you don’t lose capability and you don’t lose the students”.

Rothwell has direct experience of mergers, from the successful 2024 merger to form the present University of Manchester. “But the key for that merger was that we were quite similar in most things,” she says. “Entry standards were similar, research standing was similar. Victoria University was bigger but UMIST was stronger on international, stronger on industry relations. It would be very hard to do a merger of two different universities. And, of course, there are some parts of the country where there aren’t two universities.”

She can’t see an easy way out of the sector’s financial problems. “There are various things that can be done and I’m now told that Labour may be looking at a modest fee increase—but an increase with inflation? Two per cent? I’m not sure that’s going to really help when you’ve been running for so many years in deficit.”

One reason Rothwell thinks that a university failure could be on the cards is the fall in international student numbers across the sector, as the previous Conservative government’s anxieties over net migration resulted in visa restrictions that impact on universities. More positive messaging could help significantly, she says, and should be a Labour priority.

Manchester is particularly reliant on overseas students. It has the second-highest number after University College London,at more than 18,000 in 2021-22, nearly 40 per cent of its overall student body. And a high percentage of Manchester’s international students are from a single country: China.

Rothwell acknowledges that overreliance on one nationality can be a problem. The answer, she thinks, is to broaden recruitment—drawing more students from the United States, for example. She is also worried about a drop in the number of home students beyond 2030, caused by demographic changes.

Lower volumes, done better

Research is another challenging area financially for universities because it is only funded to around 70 per cent of full costs. Rothwell, an expert in neurological disease, still attends lab meetings for her research group every Friday and has promised to remain on hand to help with fundraising and grant applications, although she has vowed not to meddle.

There are two options for the new government when it comes to research, she suggests. One is to put more money in and fully fund research; the other is for institutions to do a lower volume of research and do it better.

Which would she choose? “I would love to do the former but if I were a politician I’d probably do the latter.”

Rothwell suspects that even big universities will have to think about how many things they can be good at. “That’s not to stop any individual doing research on what they want to do, because that’s what universities are about, but it’s [about] saying our focus will have to not be on everything, rather than just spreading the money evenly.”

She welcomes the fact that government money is increasingly going to consortia, particularly in the sciences, where big sums are involved—“I don’t think the UK is big enough or wealthy enough for everybody to be competing against each other”—and predicts more partnerships, both within regions and more broadly.

But Rothwell is against devolving research funding. “I would want us [Manchester] to win in a national competition rather than be given money on a formula or something else,” she says, concerned that devolved allocation could not match the rigour of such competitions.

Innovation is different. She argues that many universities which might not be considered research-intensive could still be strong on innovation.

Meanwhile, she is concerned that while the UK retains a strong position in research, it risks falling behind, particularly with more money being invested in Asia. “The trouble is, you don’t see the impacts for five or 10 years, so I do think that’s a risk.”

Planned changes to the 2029 Research Excellence Framework—particularly a boosted people, culture and environment element—could feed into this.

While Rothwell strongly supports recognising the importance of research culture, she “would personally have done it separately because I feel it’s diluting the hard measures, and what international partners and competitors look to are the hard measures”. She also thinks research culture is hard to assess.

Rebalancing representation

Rothwell holds this view despite spending so much of her career emphasising the importance of social responsibility. Making that equal to research and teaching at Manchester is, she says, her proudest achievement during her time there.

Rothwell has also been at the forefront of cultural changes in the sector. She was once the only female Russell Group vice-chancellor. Now, more than a third are women. She was also the first female chair of the Russell Group. Her senior team, which used to be 70 per cent men, is now 50/50 men and women. Proving tougher to change, Rothwell says, is the representation of other characteristics, such as ethnicity. And the gender pay gap still needs careful monitoring, she adds.

Rothwell’s own pay of £260,000 is lower than many of her vice-chancellor colleagues. She has refused a pay audit for years, she says, feeling well paid for a job she loves, and wants to keep the ratio of her salary to that of the lowest and median employees consistent—in fact, she says it has recently become lower, without disclosing details. “This money is our students’ money and taxpayers’ money,” she says. 

Rothwell points out that UK vice-chancellors are still paid far less than their US and Australian counterparts—an interesting observation, considering where her successor is coming from.

Recently, she has noticed that some vice-chancellors have started on slightly lower salaries and thinks there is more awareness of what is appropriate than in the past. “One or two [vice-chancellors] are not that happy but they’re kind enough to be polite. But one or two have started on slightly lower salaries recently. So I think they are a bit more aware,” she says.

Despite all the challenges universities face, Rothwell is optimistic. She welcomes the increased interest in collaboration and in global partnerships, as well as the focus on delivering value. “Universities have really switched to move away from just ‘we discover things’ to ‘we discover things and we deliver value from it’,” she says. “That’s been a big change. We’ve now all got big commercialisation arms and spinout companies, and so on. Many now have a social agenda, even if it’s not quite as overt as ours.

“The idea of the Ivory Towers is just gone. We see ourselves as part of a community.”

If that indeed is a widespread, enduring shift across universities, then Rothwell, in her time leading Manchester, has been a force driving it.

The post Nancy Rothwell on stepping down and speaking out appeared first on Research Professional News.

Our third look at the new government's task covers national strategy, private investment and inequality

Allan Nixon: Science minister can pick up where he left off

How many Research Professional readers did a double-take when they learned that Patrick Vallance was the science minister? I certainly did. The news came only hours after confirmation that the fledgling Department of Science, Innovation and Technology would be retained, with Peter Kyle at the helm.

Best known for his pandemic press conferences, as chief scientific adviser, Vallance was the single biggest influence on the last government’s science strategy. The Science and Technology Framework published in March 2023 focused on building “strategic advantage” in five technologies—artificial intelligence, quantum, engineering biology, semiconductors and future telecoms.

The Framework had its flaws—the case for prioritising future telecoms is weak, for example. And despite the attempt to target activity on a handful of critical areas, the government continued to spread investments too broadly to achieve its laudable goals.

But fundamentally, it was the right approach. At its core was the understanding that countries leading in frontier technologies such as AI will be more prosperous and secure.

Historically, the UK has historically been poor at leveraging its world-beating R&D. UK R&D expenditure makes up around 5 per cent of the world’s research resources, yet our global share of value-added output from R&D-intensive industries has fallen to 2.6 per cent. Crudely, this means the country is getting out half of what it is putting in compared with the rest of the world.

The strategy set a course for fixing that, but there is much more to do. Vallance might argue that any missteps since he left government last April stemmed from execution rather than strategy. Now that he’s in the ministerial chair, that excuse won’t be available.

Allan Nixon is head of science and technology at the think tank Onward

Naomi Weir: Give business a platform for investment

The new government’s headline appointments show the seriousness of its plans for science. Shadow post-holders, including Peter Kyle at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), have gone straight into departments. And those tasked with Patrick Vallance’s induction as science minister probably feel they can cut the intro and get straight down to business.

At the foundations, to give businesses the confidence to invest, the government must set a clear ambition and a create predictable environment. Delivering the promised long-term R&D budgets and setting the direction of travel for the regulatory environment, not least on artificial intelligence and data, will be key. National assets such as universities and Catapult centres should be given a firm budgetary footing and engaged as partners in the design and delivery of industrial strategy.

Second, we need to harness existing innovation and technology, from digital tech to management practices. Accelerating adoption has extraordinary potential to boost productivity, improve public services and address labour market challenges. Policy here needs clear ownership and strategy—DSIT, with Kyle’s vision for a cross-government leadership role, is its natural home.

Finally, now is the time to kill once and for all the sense that the UK is good at research but fails to convert that into value. From procurement and planning, to access to finance, it’s critical to reshape the environment so that it makes commercial sense for the private sector to exploit ideas at scale. The existing Science and Technology Framework presents a credible outline. Given his role in creating it, having Vallance at the helm is a head start we weren’t expecting.

Naomi Weir is director of innovation and technology at the Confederation of British Industry

Jim McDonald: Go big on industrial strategy

I am pleased that chancellor Rachel Reeves has declared economic growth the UK’s “national mission”. The engineering profession wants to see the new government take a holistic, long-term approach to complex challenges such as climate change and slow growth, creating strong policies on which to build sustainable economic growth, helping to improve lives. 

The nation needs an ambitious vision that draws on our strengths in engineering, innovation, research and manufacturing, underpinned by sustained policies that align actions across regulation, procurement, planning, funding, infrastructure, technology adoption, and a national strategy for the engineering and technology workforce.

The UK already has a foothold in areas like artificial intelligence, quantum and biotechnology. Adopting a long-term industrial strategy will help to leverage our impressive engineering and technology capabilities in these and other areas.

The National Engineering Policy Centre says the UK should aim to lead the G7 in R&D intensity, supporting and capitalising on its exceptional research base and leveraging private investment. We should also boost support for close-to-market R&D and demonstrator projects, as these are key stepping stones to commercialisation.

The UK should be a place where high-tech, innovative start-ups get access to the finance, facilities, infrastructure and talent they need to grow. Such companies are catalysts for change, helping to drive prosperity that can be shared across all regions, communities and groups in society.

Laying the foundations of productivity, economic growth and societal benefit requires policies that will work well beyond the next parliament. A strong and consistent industrial strategy is critical to the future success of this country; the engineering community stands ready to help.  

Jim McDonald is president of the Royal Academy of Engineering 

Melanie Smallman: Embracing technology must not create inequality

Keir Starmer’s Labour government showed its commitment to science and innovation in its first few hours, appointing former chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance as science minister and expanding the remit of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to include “transforming public service and fuelling economic growth”. Science should be all set, then.

The long-term funding commitments promised will bring much-needed stability. But given the real-term cuts to science funding over past decades, there will be pressure to increase the pot. Maintaining access to Horizon Europe, as well as developing partnerships and joint funding vehicles, will be key to leveraging UK public money. And somehow, stability needs to be extended to higher education, wobbling with the current funding model.

DSIT’s trickiest task will be in its role as the centre of digital expertise and delivery. Digital innovation is a key driver of inequality in the UK, bringing growth to hub cities while leaving regional and non-university towns to make do with the low paid, insecure platform jobs that their neighbours have created.

As machines replace people, tax returns fall, making public services even harder to fund. All this means that any roll-out of artificial intelligence and digital technologies across government is likely to bring DSIT into conflict with other departments’ missions, particularly around levelling up.

Evaluating and monitoring the equality implications of new technologies will be vital. Starmer’s council of the regions and nations needs to be on the case; replicating the Blair and Brown governments’ focus on regional innovation and growth strategies might help.

Melanie Smallman is professor of science and technology studies at University College London and a former scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

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Industrial strategy, charities and interdisciplinarity feature in our second collection of post-election expert comment

Richard Jones: Make universities the heart of the growth agenda

Above all, growth. The new government knows that none of its ambitions will be achievable without a recovery from the last decade and a half’s economic stagnation. Everything will be judged by the contribution it can make to that goal, and research and innovation will be no exception.

The immediate shadow lying over UK public sector research and innovation is the university funding crisis. The crisis in higher education is on the list of unexploded bombs facing the new government, drawn up by Sue Gray, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff.

But it’s vital for higher education to be perceived not just as a problem to be fixed, but as central to getting the economy growing again. Some clues to the new government’s approach here can be found in the Mais Lecture given by Rachel Reeves in March before she became chancellor.

Reeves’s “securonomics” owes much to what the United States-based economist Dani Rodrik calls productivism. At the centre of this will be an industrial strategy, with both a sector focus, supporting areas of UK comparative advantage, and a regional focus, developing clusters and seeking to unlock the potential agglomeration benefits in underperforming big cities.

Universities need to be at the heart of this. The pressure will be on, not just to produce more spinouts and to work with industry, but to support the diffusion of innovation across regional economies.

Beyond the growth imperative, the government’s priorities are defined by its missions. A commitment to cheap, zero-carbon electricity by 2030 will be a stretch, and R&D will need to be focused to support renewables, new nuclear and grid upgrades. In health, commitments to reduce health inequalities imply an emphasis on prevention, with high hopes placed on data and artificial intelligence. And the threatening geopolitical situation inevitably means a renewed focus on defence.

Richard Jones is vice-president for regional innovation and civic engagement, and professor of materials physics and innovation policy, at the University of Manchester

Nicola Perrin: Shore up support for charity research

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the UK is facing a health crisis. The number of people living with a major illness is rising, and is predicted to reach one in five of us by 2040. Research offers the potential to tackle this, unlocking new ways to detect, treat and prevent disease—and give hope.

Last year, medical research charities invested £1.7 billion in UK research, with 87 per cent of grants awarded to universities. But universities, and the world-class research environments they provide, are under increasing financial strain. 

If UK research is to flourish, the new government must commit to putting universities on a sustainable footing. This includes backing existing mechanisms: here, the key ask from medical research charities is for enhanced support to underpin the indirect cost of charity investment in universities, through the government’s Charity Research Support Fund.

The CRSF recognises the crucial role of charities in the ecosystem, funding research that is driven by patient priorities, tackles unmet need and accelerates health impact. But its funding has stagnated for over a decade, threatening the viability of charity-university research partnerships.

The new government must invest to secure the foundations of UK R&D. Strong and sustainable backing for life science is crucial to enable others, including charities, to collaborate and invest with confidence. Working together, we can accelerate access to innovation, cement the UK’s position as a world leader in research, and improve health outcomes for everyone.

Nicola Perrin is chief executive of the Association of Medical Research Charities

Hetan Shah: Review HE funding, bridge disciplines, deepen global ties 

Despite or perhaps even because of the challenges facing higher education—including financial strain from frozen fees, hostility towards international students and criticism of ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’—the new government has a unique opportunity to enhance the UK’s R&D landscape, especially in the humanities, arts and social sciences. 

Financial pressure on universities has already led to severe cuts, particularly to courses in the Shape disciplines (social sciences, humanities and arts for people and economy), threatening our research reputation. The British Academy urges the new government to review funding comprehensively, support a broad range of subjects and address regional disparities of provision.  

The government must also value interdisciplinary research to tackle societal challenges. Combining insights from Shape and Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is essential for ethical, inclusive and sustainable innovation. Greater collaboration between the science and university portfolios would support system-wide synergies, while Labour’s proposal for 10-year budgets for key R&D institutions would bring welcome stability for researchers, innovators and investors. 

Building on the UK rejoining Horizon Europe, there’s an opportunity to deepen global partnerships. Reducing barriers to international research, such as high visa costs, is crucial for keeping the UK as a global innovation hub. 

Labour’s promise to back research institutions is encouraging. To achieve this, we desperately need sustainable universities, more support for interdisciplinary research and increased international collaboration. A swift review of higher education funding will allow the UK to continue leading in innovation, human understanding and its £108 billion creative industries. 

Hetan Shah is chief executive of the British Academy 

Pam Waddell: Learn from—and work with—regional innovation policy

Labour’s plans to kickstart economic growth recognise that this depends on innovation, along with what it calls “a new partnership with business” and “a significant expansion of economic devolution in England”. The West Midlands is well positioned to work with this agenda.

The Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands combines a bottom-up voice through a team of embedded innovation experts in business-facing, sector-specific organisations, with a top-down perspective from the West Midlands Combined Authority’s Innovation Board, made up of industry, university and policy leaders. Innovation is at the heart of regional policy, including strategic partnerships such as the West Midlands Innovation Accelerator, developed with Innovate UK.

This integrated approach has taught us three key lessons for developing the innovation aspects of industrial strategy and working with local governance, industry and universities.

First, innovation differs across sectors and scales of businesses in terms of language, approach and timescale, and every region has its own unique mix. Listening and responding to this diversity is challenging, but essential for those designing innovation policy and support; existing regional partnerships can facilitate this dialogue.

Second, a lot of innovation happens at the interfaces between sectors. With the right exposure and support, technology or knowledge from one sector can often solve a problem in another. This shouldn’t be overlooked when industrial strategy focuses on particular sectors or technologies.

Third, businesses will only innovate if they anticipate a commercial or business benefit. Changes in the regulation and practice of public procurement can create markets for innovative businesses. Likewise, incentives and partnerships—with universities, customers or other businesses—that de-risk or accelerate innovation are key. But all interventions must be built on an understanding of this commercial driver.

Pam Waddell is director of the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands

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Chris Day assesses what the change of government could mean for the university sector

The first change of government for 14 years marks a momentous occasion for the UK. Now that the anticipation is over, sectors and industries across the country will be clamouring to understand what this result means for them, and what their relationship with the new Labour government will look like.

For researchers, there are reasons to be feeling positive after years of ups and downs. During the Conservative government, we saw the highs of what positive research collaboration can look like: mobilising during the pandemic to support the NHS, shaping policies to help keep people safe, and rapidly developing life-saving vaccines.

However, we have also experienced the uncertainties of the period before the UK’s association to Horizon Europe was confirmed, Official Development Assistance (ODA)-related research funding being pulled at short notice and a rise in research security concerns amid increasingly volatile international relations.

Good signs

Early signs from the new government are good; there has been plenty of positive rhetoric about the role universities play in driving growth for the UK and reinforcing our position on the world stage––a welcome change in tone from some recent criticisms. And the latest analysis suggests R&D investment may already be close to 3 per cent of GDP, something that the Russell Group and others across the sector have been pushing for, and a good starting point for growth.

However, this positive tone now needs to be backed up with a robust, ambitious long-term funding strategy for research that doesn’t just talk the talk but delivers on its potential.

Our R&D investment is still failing to keep up with that of other comparable nations––Germany, for example, is aiming to reach 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2025, while South Korea’s is already at 5 per cent––and a longer-term commitment to a healthy R&D budget would be a good indicator of how bold the new government is willing to be in this area in future.

Labour’s revival of a proper industrial strategy is a welcome signal. This will clearly form a key part of the party’s drive for growth, and research-intensive universities are ready and willing to be partners in these endeavours.

Other manifesto pledges include reforms to planning––including removing barriers to capital developments such as high-tech labs and data centres––and a new Regulatory Innovation Office, which should speed up the journey of bringing new products and ideas to market, supporting our innovation economy.

Block grants

But for all their promise, any new initiatives must be accompanied by a renewed commitment towards block grant funding for research and innovation—most importantly quality-related research (QR) and higher education innovation funding (HEIF) and their equivalents in the devolved nations.

This is funding that really works because it can be targeted locally by the universities best placed to make a difference. It is funding that underpins the research and innovation capabilities of our sector and is responsible for many of the success stories that governments are keen to celebrate. For example, strategic investment at Newcastle University in 70 academic-track fellows, to ensure a pipeline of brilliant new researchers at the forefront of a range of disciplines, would not be happening without a reliable QR funding stream.

There are countless other examples across the country—from the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, specialising in vaccine development, to the University of Nottingham’s partnership with GSK that resulted in the UK’s first carbon-neutral lab.

Funding through HEIF, meanwhile, is helping to take brilliant ideas from our research into new spinout companies that are likely to be engines for future economic growth. Universities have utilised their HEIF funds to help grow innovation ecosystems, such as Midlands Mindforge, a new investment company co-founded by the universities of Birmingham, Nottingham and Warwick that supports entrepreneurs and helps turn university research and innovation into successful businesses.

This funding is an essential part of the R&D funding landscape that gives universities the flexibility to both plan for the long term and remain responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges. It is one of the reasons we can remain so internationally competitive when it comes to trailblazing research. A creative and ambitious approach to R&D and innovation will be welcomed by the sector, but not if it comes at the cost of squeezing this long-term funding pipeline that supports so much vital activity.

Seeking reassurance

We should, however, feel encouraged by signs that the Labour government understands the need for long-term stability. The promise of 10-year budgets for key R&D institutions is a nod towards the need for predictable and sustainable planning, although we will need to await more details to see how this will function in practice, how these institutions will be selected, and whether it comes with any risk to basic research.

Of course, it would be naive to overlook that the new government is inheriting a hugely challenging fiscal landscape and a myriad of competing priorities. But rather than being just another entry on the to-do list, providing reassurance and a compelling plan for the university sector would be a valuable tool for solving some of the country’s most pressing problems.

Universities have an opportunity to showcase how R&D capabilities make us a hugely beneficial partner, at both regional and national level, helping to address some of our biggest societal challenges––from healthcare to net zero and defence.

And the country won’t be able to deliver on these key priorities without a highly skilled workforce. Russell Group universities teach four out of five new UK doctors and dentists, more than one in every three engineers, and two in three mathematicians. Maintaining the right level of choice and quality in the higher education system will need a robust and sustainable funding system but will be crucial to supporting the ambitious growth the new government is so keen to drive.

Whatever your political persuasions, a moment of change like this is a useful catalyst, and colleagues across the sector will be seizing this chance to reset the conversation on universities and their relationship to Westminster. It’s reassuring to hear that new ministers want to be cheerleaders for our sector, not adversaries.

As campaigning gives way to the real business of governing, my main message to the new government is that our sector has a huge amount to offer and we hope to be a partner of choice in helping to deliver a bright future for the UK.

Chris Day is vice-chancellor of Newcastle University and chair of the Russell Group.

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Senior figures call for action on funding, human capital, EU relations, bureaucracy and NHS research

Anna Vignoles: Fix the crisis, focus on skills

I have two priorities for the new government: one urgent, the other ambitious.

First, efforts to boost our research and innovation need to recognise the interconnectedness of the different parts of the university system. The current model has unsustainable funding baked in: insufficient domestic fees, cross-subsidy from international students, and not covering the full cost of research. Without swift and decisive action to give higher education a sustainable financial model, we’ll see a long-term decline in our institutions and research base.

Second, investment in skills must go hand in hand with investment in R&D. Otherwise, fantastic research will be undertaken elsewhere, in countries with more skilled populations. It’s perhaps not immediately apparent, but UK research and innovation is being held back by technician shortages, teacher shortages, and a lack of investment in further education, to name but a few.

We need a workforce—homegrown and from elsewhere—with the breadth and depth of skill required for a rapidly changing environment. Yet education for post-16 students is unusually narrow compared with other countries, with an unhelpful divide between science and other subjects. Post-16 education needs reform to boost basic skills for some, strengthen the vocational training offer, and give graduates a broader range of skills, regardless of their academic discipline.

We cannot be a world leader in research and innovation without sustaining world-leading institutions and talent. The social benefits from education and research underscore the need for robust state support to achieve this.

Anna Vignoles is chief executive of the Leverhulme Trust

Andrew Morris: Lead on investment, make visas cheaper, boost NHS research

Britain is a world leader in innovation and health research. Labour must show the scientific community that it is committed to placing research and innovation at the heart of its mission-driven government to drive growth and improve lives. That should include a goal to lead the G7 in R&D investment. As it stands, UK R&D investment is not internationally competitive.

Success in research and innovation also means attracting skilled people from around the world, but at present international talent faces extortionate visa costs. A family of four coming to the UK to take up a PhD-level role on a five-year skilled worker visa faces up to £24,000 in upfront fees—far higher than competitor nations.

This negates any claim to be open to international scientific talent; researchers, patients and the economy are paying the price. The new government should make turning the page on this damaging policy an urgent priority.

The NHS is an unparalleled hub for medical research, delivering breakthroughs such as a Covid-19 vaccine. However, we’re not fully harnessing its power. Labour must commit to cultivating a new generation of leaders, including reversing the decline in clinical academics—the doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals who bridge universities and the NHS. By ring-fencing staff time for research and reinvesting the income generated, we’ll keep the NHS at the forefront of medical innovation, improving patient care and powering economic growth.

Andrew Morris is president of the Academy of Medical Sciences

Jan Palmowski: Build links within Europe

In relation to the EU, the new UK government must focus on three linked priorities.

First, it must commit to association with the successor to the current Horizon Europe R&D programme, Framework Programme 10. Domestically, making higher education funding sustainable will be a top priority, but this cannot crowd out efforts to strengthen European and global links in research and innovation. We need our best minds to address our common challenges, and for this researchers and their institutions need long-term stability.

Second, rejoining Erasmus+ would be a perfect way to reset the relationship with the EU. At its core, Erasmus+ is about young people’s personal growth and fulfilment. The UK’s insistence on a financial rate of return from the programme always baffled Brussels. As well as benefitting students immeasurably, British participation in Erasmus+ would show that the UK sees itself again as part of the European family of nations.

These two actions would build trust and influence critical for a third domain—research security and intellectual property. One focus of the next framework programme will be shoring up Europe’s competitiveness and security in critical technologies. Questions about IP sharing, research security, and protocols for international collaboration will become even more important.

Finding agreement and trust in these areas will take time. The sooner the UK and the EU start developing a common understanding and robust common protocols, the more transformative their collaboration in research and innovation—and higher education—can be.

Jan Palmowski is professor of modern history at the University of Warwick, and will resume his role as secretary-general of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities on 1 August

Lorna Wilson: Bear down on bureaucracy, change tack on security

Faced with a new government with many priorities and little cash, it’s vital to continue making the case for investment in R&D. That includes its role not only in economic growth, but in supporting delivery and innovation in public services, and in tackling societal challenges such as climate change and health.

The UK’s aspirations for R&D spending should be more ambitious, including a government commitment to get spending to at least 3 per cent of GDP. The longer-term funding settlement promised by Labour would be welcome, although it needs the flexibility to adapt to global events (such as a pandemic) and to grow if public finances improve.

Given the financial constraints, the more time spent on activities that add value—be that for academics, research management professionals, funders, partners, or whoever—the better. Here there is still much to be done, and to be achieved, by delivering the recommendations of the Tickell Review on reducing research bureaucracy. That should include continuing the work of the Bureaucracy Review and Reform Implementation Network in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

On national security, universities would welcome a more joined-up approach from government. We need to move away from the culture of compliance driven by a proliferation of legislation and approach these issues pragmatically, creating a robust and secure R&D system without unnecessarily restricting the international collaboration that underpins the UK’s global leadership in research.

Lorna Wilson is chair of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators and managing director of research and innovation services at Durham University

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