FOR REFERENCE ONLY
The AHRC will be changing the way it allocates postgraduate funding for students who will commence study in the academic year 2009/10. Following the recommendations from the Postgraduate Working Group AHRC will be introducing 2 new postgraduate competitions to replace the current Open Competition. These are:
- Block Grant Partnership (BGP) - The BGP competition will allow organisations to submit proposals for five years worth of award allocations and will run every fourth year of the five year cycle. In order to be eligible to apply, organisations must have been offered an average of eight or more awards per annum in the 2003-07 open competitions.
- AHRC Studentship Competition - The AHRC studentship competition will provide students with the opportunity to submit an individual bid for an award at a non-BGP institution and will be run in a similar way to the current open competition.
N.B. The Studentship compeition was replaced with the block Grant Partnerships: Capacity Building Route in 2010.
The aim of the new competitions is to facilitate long term engagement with organisation strategies, allowing organisations who receive large numbers of AHRC awards to work strategically and enable long term planning, whilst also enabling the funding of pockets of excellence and capacity building within the arts and humanities at organisations who traditionally receive smaller number of awards (and therefore would not constitute a block award). The Postgraduate Committee and the AHRC have been working since early 2007 on the mechanisms to implement the two new postgraduate competitions. Several consultation events were held between April and July to gain feedback from the community on the changes, and the presentations from these events are available.
Many issues were raised at the consultation events (please see the Executive Summary for further information) and these have all been fed into the Committee's discussions concerning the implementation of the competitions. Please see Key Recommendations for more information on the implementation of the schemes.
Postgraduate Working Group
The AHRC established a working group in March 2006 to review whether the student-led, open competition remains the most appropriate and effective way for the AHRC to allocate its postgraduate funding.
The group, chaired by Professor Rachel Cooper, Director of the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University, examined the existing system and alternative mechanisms for allocating AHRC funding for postgraduate research and training. The review has aimed to consult widely with the arts and humanities academic community to look at positive ways of best funding postgraduate academic excellence. Issues such as the health of disciplines, the sustainability of the research base, maintaining excellence and building capacity in postgraduate research and training in the arts and humanities have been the focus for the working group's activities, particularly in light of the AHRC's responsibilities as a Research Council. As a Research Council it is vital that we work with the academic community to look at both the health of arts and humanities disciplines and their strategic direction, as do our colleagues in the other Councils within their domains.
The working group compiled its report that was issued for consultation with the community in October 2006. The deadline for the receipt of responses to this report was 3 November 2006 and a summary of the responses gained from the consultation process is available. The Postgraduate Committee agreed the recommendations of the Postgraduate Review Working Group in February 2007 and AHRC's Council have also agreed the recommendations at their meeting on 15 March 2007.
Consultation Events
Between April and August 2007, we held a series of regional consultation events. Copies of the presentations given at the events can be downloaded by clicking on the links below.