We are committed to delivering excellence in postgraduate training and supporting the development of highly capable and innovative researchers for a wide range of careers.
Building capability has been one of the four key areas of activity since we launched our Strategic Plan 2015. Since then we have developed our postgraduate training strategy 2017 to 2023 which is central to our delivery of this.
In 2010 ESRC established a national network of 21 institutional and consortia-level Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) through which we delivered our funding for postgraduate training from October 2011 to September 2017.
We wanted to build on this approach and we now support a network of doctoral training partnerships, each of which supports six cohorts of students. These began in October 2017.
To support our postgraduate training strategy 2017 to 2023, we published a new set of postgraduate training and development guidelines. These set out our detailed expectations for research training.
In response to the ‘review of the PhD in the social sciences’ and as part of the new opportunity to commission the doctoral training network from 2024, we have published our postgraduate training and development guidelines 2022. These will take effect from October 2024.
Further details about the terms and conditions of studentship funding can be found in the postgraduate funding guide.