Postgraduate Education Practitioners Network Clinic — October 2025
On October 23rd 2025, the Co-Chairs of our Postgraduate Education Practitioners’ (PEP) Network, Susanna Broom and Kerri Gardiner, held a Network Clinic looking at the specific issues and unique challenges which face those working within postgraduate research. Their report on the event is below.
The next in our (roughly) quarterly series of PEP Network clinics – which aim to provide a safe and supportive environment for members to connect with one another and to share questions, concerns, and insights – saw colleagues from across the sector reflect on their experiences of implementing the UKRI’s revised Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) at their institutions:
- Colleagues were asked to indicate whether their institutions are rolling out the new T&Cs across all funding routes (e.g. internal funding). While there was a universal desire to do this, in practice it has proved challenging for some institutions in the current financial landscape, leading to concerns about a ‘two tier’ landscape emerging in PGR funding.
- When asked to reflect on whether they had experienced any issues about implementing the revised T&Cs, colleagues noted: the relatively short run-in to implementation (given institutional complexities); challenges around system configurations and updates in order to accommodate the new requirements; structural differences across institutions potentially leading to inconsistent application of the T&Cs within institutions; differing interpretations of the T&Cs leading to inconsistent application between institutions; and concern about increased administrative demands at a time when resource is being squeezed.
- Broader conversations followed where colleagues compared their institutions’ approaches to handling different percentages of part-time registration, and how different types of leave (as defined under the new T&Cs) are handled.
We will take these thoughts back to the UKCGE and discuss the potential for an approach to UKRI about when a review may take place, and how colleagues might be able to feed into one.
Thank you to everyone who attended today. All PEP Network members are welcome to come along to a clinic. We do want these sessions to be driven by your needs, so please feel free to suggest topics using the form linked below.
Following suggestions at today’s clinic, we will focus on generative AI at the next clinic in January, providing a space for colleagues to share their experiences of developing policies, procedures and practice around the use of generative AI tools in postgraduate research.