The debate surrounding funding or loans for PGT’s continues to go around in familiar circles. Having attended the All Party Parlimentary Debate in the House of Lords on 7th May the same questions were asked by Adrian Smith (amongst others) and the same response was forthcoming from Minister David Willetts. It is apparent that the Minister does not seem to understand or believe HEI’s when they say that they are worried about PGT recruitment in the future with the changes in funding, increased graduate debt. His observation is that they have not decreased PGT funding and therefore it should be in the same state of health that it has always been in. This is reinforced by HEFCE who say that the funding has remained the same under this Government. It leaves you kind of doubting your sanity when you look at the PGT income from HEFCE in your institution and see that is much lower than it used to be – are we interpreting it correctly or is there a clever game of smoke and mirrors going on? What is becoming very clear is that Government (DBIS) is not contemplating extending the ug loan scheme to cover pgt as it is not in the financial projections and with DBIS facing cuts (or even re-organisation) in the imminent spending review there is no spare cash to fund a PGT loan scheme. David Willetts did actually challenge Universities to come to DBIS to broker individual agreements on PGT loans but only if they agree to cross subsidise the potential default on repayment (approx. 25%). It’s unlikely that many HEI’s will rush to take up this offer I guess! The UKCGE has been concentrating its efforts during 2013 on PGT issues and the forthcoming workshop on ​“Barriers to pg study” with HEFCE (17th June) and the Annual Conference ​“Masterclass” (1st/​2nd July) are testament to this, we hope to see many of our member HEI’s at either or both of these events with the opportunity to send strong lobbying messages to funders and DBIS.
 
Meanwhile, the PGR landscape continues to evolve and once again hopes and dreams have been raised by 3 of the research councils (EPSRC, NERC and AHRC) running competitions for bids for Doctoral Training Centres (DTC’s/DTPs/Block Grants). As the DTC model spreads across the entire breadth of the RC’s, NERC being the last to join the party, experience is being fed back into the ​“experiment” by the early adopter, EPSRC who are doing the rounds of bids for the 2nd time. Emphasis seems to be shifting inexorably towards DTC models that involve partnership with other HEI’s and whilst this is one way to ensure critical mass it challenges consortia to deliver with what turns out to be inadequate networking resource allocation, as recipients of networked ESRC DTC’s are finding to their cost. Sustainability of DTC’s post RC funding is also a key feature of the new rounds of applications and HEI’s are having to commit to funding these when RC funding ceases or declines. I’m pretty sure there is a lot of ​“over-commitment” going on in these bids. It’s interesting to raise the question of where does the HEI commitment come from? And the answer will be, for most if they are honest, from Qr funding, in other words from dual support i.e. another funding council. Is it fair that the RC’s should shift the administrative burden for their funding onto HEFCE funding streams?? And how much farther can this go? The DTC/DTP funding model will inevitably lead to even more research concentration and we can expect yet more change to the Qr funding formula post REF14 results that will fuel this process.