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2 weeks ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
“The Government will explore introducing a levy on higher education provider income from international students, to be reinvested into the higher education and skills system.
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3 weeks ago | 
wonkhe.com | James Coe |Mark Leach
UKRI has a massive job. As the National Audit Office’s (NAO) new report sets out in 2023–24 UKRI assessed close to 29,000 grant funding applications and spent £6bn on innovation grants. It featured in 105 policy papers across 13 ministerial departments in the last three years alone, and it has been seven years since the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) formally set out UKRI’s role and objectives.
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2 months 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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Mar 2, 2025 | 
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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Feb 26, 2025 | 
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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Feb 24, 2025 | 
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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Feb 23, 2025 | 
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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Feb 17, 2025 | 
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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Jan 30, 2025 | 
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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Jan 27, 2025 | 
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.
