Plaid plans, SNP aspirations
In an interview with Research Professional (£), Plaid Cymru’s higher education and research spokesman, Cefin Campbell MS, said his party would devolve UKRI funding to ensure Wales gets its fair share if they win May’s election. He also pledged that within its first 100 days in power it would set up an independent, cross-party review panel to look at all aspects of universities in Wales. Meanwhile in Scotland, the SNP reaffirmed its commitment to free tuition and also pledged cost-of-living increases to the nursing student bursary, but said nothing about the mainstream Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) package for the roughly 130,000 Scottish-domiciled undergraduates who depend on it.
The party pledges are framed by a backdrop of mixed views in both nations (and indeed the wider UK) about research and border trust in science. The Campaign for Science & Engineering recently commissioned polling on public attitudes towards research and development in Scotland and Wales. The responses cover a sample of over 2,700 adults in Scotland and over 1,600 adults in Wales, with mixed results. Whilst most voters support R&D investment, regardless of voting intention, and see R&D investment as important for their devolved government, elsewhere there was very low visibility of the R&D sector (with 87% in Scotland and 91% in Wales saying they didn’t know much or anything about R&D being undertaken in their nation). A more sombre note was sounded in a survey carried out by More In Common and commissioned by the Wellcome Trust. It found that trust in science is becoming more “lukewarm and conditional”, with almost a third of UK voters believing science is too driven by social and political causes, while one in five believe scientists are “too woke”, new polling suggests.
Other news in brief
- Personnel changes: In early April, Steven Hill, director of research at Research England, announced that he will be leaving the funding council to seek a new challenge. In a separate move later in the month, Westminster’s science, innovation & tech committee endorsed the UK Government’s preferred candidate, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, to become the new chair of UKRI.
- Erasmus breakthrough: The UK Government confirmed in April that the EU and the UK have legally formalised the latter’s return to the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, which the UK left after Brexit. It has also been confirmed that the British Council is set to run the mobility scheme, as it did before. The UK Government’s alternative Turing Scheme was outsourced to Capita for almost two years and was then run by the education department. The UK will rejoin Erasmus+ for a year in 2027, paying £570 million, with longer-term arrangements not yet confirmed.
- ESRC scheme detail: Some further meat was put on the bones of two ESRC schemes trailed earlier in the year. The research council has £1.5 million to distribute under the pilots of its two new applicant-led schemes, dubbed Connect and React. In an interview with Research Professional (£), ESRC executive chair Stian Westlake said that the Connect Awards will provide space for early collaboration on ideas within and beyond the social sciences that are novel, exploratory and high risk, whilst the React Awards will focus on immediate societal impact. UKRI’s broader changes to research funding have attracted criticism in recent weeks, however, with Marcus Munafò (deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Bath) speaking of “a risk we could end up in a situation where some technologies or certain disciplines fall off a cliff—go past a certain threshold because they don’t have a critical mass of funding to support them… We need to think about the research ecosystem as national capability and infrastructure that we need to keep healthy to allow us to react to unknown scenarios in the future.”
- Government use of social science analysed: In a piece for WonkHE, our own Rita Gardner stressed the benefits of deeper embedding of robust social science evidence and methodologies within UK Government policy.
- British Academy open access report: The transition to longform open access publishing is suffering from ‘gridlock’, and a national strategy is needed to break it before the next REF, according to a report by the British Academy. The BA argue that while there is “evident passion for OA” across academics, librarians and publishers, without a joined-up strategy there is little hope of achieving it for books.