The Academy has today published a new report which summarises the scale and trends in research funding for the social sciences across UK higher education.
The social sciences is one of the largest of the UK higher education (HE) sectors and features, to varying extents, in almost all higher education institutions. In the academic year 2021/22 the HE social sciences sector had a total of 893,250 full time equivalent (FTE) enrolled students and 29,235 FTE academic staff on ‘teaching and research’ contracts.
The UK is a world leader in social science research and its impact. 80% of the social science research submitted as part of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework exercise was recognised to be world leading or internationally excellent. In addition, recent reports have highlighted that social science research is instrumental in tackling societal challenges, bolstering competitive advantage, understanding people and places and empowering communities, as well as the important but presently underdeveloped role they play in the UK’s research, development and innovation framework.
Governments, business and charities all draw heavily on social science research, including the knowledge base in universities and insights among practitioners, to aid in policy and strategy development, implementation, growth and evaluation. Therefore, sustained research and development funding in the social sciences is essential in underpinning social science research and its applications.
The Academy’s new report draws largely on published annual Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) research funding data for the nine academic years between 2013/14 and 2021/22. It presents a selection of the data available and analyses the social sciences sector in comparison with the medical and biological sciences sector, the physical sciences, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) sector and the arts and humanities sector. It also presents the individual cost centres within the social sciences sector.
As a result, the report provides insight into the quantity, distribution and change over time of research funding for the social science sector as a whole and across disciplines and discipline clusters within it; acts as a reference study for the documentation of change in the future, and in identifying areas of particular concern that the Academy’s learned society members may wish to follow up on for ‘their’ disciplines; and, perhaps most importantly, raises questions about what the UK wants from its social science sector research and the appetite for its funding.
Dr Rita Gardner CBE FAcSS, Chief Executive of the Academy of Social Sciences, said, “Social science research is fundamental to understanding and helping to mitigate many of the economic, social, place-based and environmental challenges we face in the UK, especially in terms of delivering vital insights to many critical areas of public policy. Yet in 2021/22 the social sciences sector received 8.3% of the total research funding reported by UK universities. We urge the UK Government and UKRI to review the funding of social science research with a view to narrowing the gap with the medical and biological sciences and STEM to release more of the sector’s potential in addressing many of the societal challenges we face at a local, regional, national and global scale.”
We aim to continue to monitor, analyse and report social science research funding data at regular intervals in the future.