The future of arts and humanities post-graduate research has been guaranteed in the UK today thanks to a five year funding commitment by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the UK funding body for the arts and humanities.
Minister of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, announced the £199 million investment which will create over six thousand new MA and PhD places over the next five years. The AHRC has introduced two new mechanisms for allocating its postgraduate funding in 2009 - the five-year Block Grant Partnership scheme and the annual Studentship Competition. These two schemes underpin the AHRC's strategic aim of supporting and promoting world-class postgraduate research and training in UK arts and humanities, in order to train the next generation of researchers to the highest standards, equipping them for a career in higher education or for a wide range of other professions.
In welcoming this investment, Lord Drayson said: ”The fact that Arts and Humanities Research Council are guaranteeing funding support for 6,500 world-leading arts and humanities post-graduate students over the next five years is excellent news. This investment by the Government will help maintain the health and sustainability of arts and humanities disciplines, by supporting established subject areas, new and emerging disciplines - such as digital design and heritage science - and vulnerable disciplines such as modern languages. This injection of funding is sure to make research in these areas an attractive career option and will see the UK retain the brightest and best in this country”.
The Block Grant Partnership scheme provides funding at Master's and doctoral level to Research Organisations (ROs) that have shown strong evidence of excellent strategic planning for, and delivery of, high quality postgraduate research and training in the arts and humanities. It enables long-term planning for the support of high quality postgraduate research and training by allocating awards to five annual cohorts of postgraduate students. It will allow ROs greater freedom in selecting the best students themselves to take up AHRC awards, and enable them to take greater responsibility for managing their five-year portfolio of awards.
The BGP scheme is complemented by the annual Studentship competition, which enables the AHRC to fund high-quality postgraduate research and training that occurs in pockets of excellence, sitting outside the ROs that have traditionally secured significant numbers of AHRC awards.
Full details of which ROs have successfully been awarded Block Grants will appear on the AHRC website shortly.
Research commissioned by the AHRC in 2006 showed that 96% of AHRC funded PhD students were in employment upon completion and that 74% of that group were working in a university or an institute of higher education. As the main function of the PhD is to prepare individuals for academic careers, this shows that the PhD students the AHRC supports are key to the future success of arts and humanities research in UK academia.
Professor Philip Esler, AHRC Chief Executive said “These new postgraduate funding mechanisms are ideally suited to ensuring that new top quality researchers will proceed into UK academic posts, where they will match and build on the world-leading arts and humanities research and impacts already pouring forth from British universities in a manner without equal in any other country.”
ENDS
Media Contact: Jake Gilmore, Communications Manager, j.gilmore@ahrc.ac.uk. Tel: 0117 9876 773
Notes to the editor
Arts & Humanities Research Council: Each year the AHRC provides approximately £100 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,000 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. Arts and humanities researchers constitute nearly a quarter of all research-active staff in the higher education sector. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.
Block Grant Partnerships (BGPs) are awards held by certain Research Organisations (ROs) for a period of 5 years, starting with students commencing their studies in October 2009. Each BGP will include a number of studentship awards and these will be advertised by the individual Research Organisations. A list of organisations holding BGPs, along with the subject areas in which they can offer studentships will be available on our website at the end of March 2009.
Under the BGPs, the RO will apply for and be awarded studentships under three schemes, which enable arts and humanities students to undertake Master’s-level study or doctoral study at a Research Organisation in the United Kingdom. Please consult the Guide to Student Eligibility (below) to determine whether you would be eligible to apply, and then contact the RO at which you would like to study to find out about their recruitment processes. Organisations may start recruitment before the outcomes of the BGP scheme have been announced, and will have their own timetable, therefore you should contact the institution at which you wish to study in good time.
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/BGP.aspx
The Studentship Competition provides postgraduate students studying at Research Organisations (ROs) in the UK with the opportunity to submit an individual proposal for an award. The Studentship Competition is of equal standing to the Block Grant Partnership (BGP) competition. Its purpose is to recognise that ROs with a historically smaller award profile with the AHRC still offer excellent postgraduate provision, and to enable these organisations to build capacity. Only ROs that do not hold a BGP award are eligible to submit proposals to the Studentship Competition.
Through its two new postgraduate funding mechanisms (the BGPs and the Studentship Competition), the AHRC aims to maintain stability across the subjects it supports, while allowing some scope for supporting newly emerging disciplines or courses. Based on the ROs solely eligible to submit applications, we anticipate that we anticipate that a large proportion of the awards made under the Studentship Competition will fall within the fields of the Creative and Performing Arts. We also expect that the majority of awards will be in the Professional Preparation Master’s Scheme.
Under the Studentship Competition, awards are available for arts and humanities students to undertake Master’s-level study or doctoral study at a Research Organisation in the United Kingdom.
http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/StudentshipCompetition.aspx