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1 month ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
On the whole research funding is not configured to be sensitive to place. RedistributionIt does good things in regions but this is different to funding being configured to do so. For example, universities in the North East performed strongly in the REF and as a consequence they received an uplift in QR funding.
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1 month ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
Skills England, the government’s new-ish arms length body exists to coordinate the work of employers, educators, and civic leaders to meet the skills needs of the country over the next decade. As the Secretary of State for Education states in the opening of Skill’s England’s inaugural reportThe first mission of this government is economic growth. Central to this mission is a skills system fit for the future.
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1 month ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
The most obvious way that a university expresses what it values is what it chooses to pay for. At an institution level this might be about which kinds of jobs in which kinds of areas are funded. At a more personal level value is made clear by how people get in and get on in an institution. PromotionIn reviewing promotion criteria of a number of universities, where it is not behind a login of some kind, one theme comes out time and time again.
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2 months ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |David Kernohan |Mark Leach
If we think about research as a means of driving innovation and by extension economic growth, there is a need to consider the lives of the people who are doing the research. The UK has a significant strength in the quality and diversity of its higher education system – which trains a large proportion of the staff who end up working in universities (and elsewhere) performing research.
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2 months ago | 
wonkhe.com | Karen Clegg |Jim Dickinson |James Coe |Mark Leach
At a time when resources within research organisations are stretched, the PGR experience, and the role doctoral supervisors play in supporting that experience, needs closer attention. The release of the pilot indicators for the REF People Culture and Environment (PCE) has promoted a flurry of conversations across UK universities as to what ‘counts’.
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2 months ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
Australia’s R&D sector is afflicted by challenges that will be familiar to UK readers. The proportion of GDP spent on research is too low. Business adoption and innovation in R&D is too shallow. Collaboration between business and academia is poor. Reliance on international student fees to fund research has rendered the entire system fragile. And the immobility of academics is stymieing the cross-pollination of ideas. However, the Australian government has a plan.
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2 months ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
Let’s get the headlines out of the way first. UKRI is increasing its PhD stipend by eight per cent to £20,780 from 1 October 2025. Wonkhe understands that this will not be funded by a reduction in the overall number of grants but instead forms part of UKRI’s funding settlement for 2025–26. PayThis means that UKRI will provide a take home income that is equivalent to the take home National Living Wage.
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2 months ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
A new paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the postdoc period, the period of flexible, temporary and often insecure work after a PhD but before a permanent role, is “no less critical than the Ph.D. in determining future academic careers.”The paper by Duan et al shows that in America the PhD studying period is not in and of itself the only determinant of whether a student will secure an academic role.
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe
It was a response to a question about venture capital funding made by the chair of ARIA, Matt Clifford, that got me thinking about how value is created in universities. At the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee he said:ARIA has been designed very explicitly as a value creation mechanism, rather than a value-capture one. That is the right call. What do we know about the benefits of innovation and publicly funded R&D? Innovators capture only about two per cent of the value created.
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Oct 20, 2024 | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
There are sectors that are dying, sectors on life support, and a handful of leading industries. Real wages are only 0.5 per cent higher in July 2024 than they were in December 2007. Had wages grown at the same rate as the US or Germany . Low wage growth is compounded by low productivity. UK workers are significantly less productive than their German, American, and French counterparts. These are average figures but the regional picture is even more troubling.
