Postgraduate Education Practitioners Network — Online Workshop 2025

The event started with an icebreaker, followed by an introduction to the first speaker: Ewan Nicholas (Senior Strategy Advisor, Talent and Skills, UKRI).

Opening his talk, Ewan explained that UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is trying to be as clear as possible about the changes it has made to the terms and conditions of Doctoral Training Grants. To help this process, his presentation was structured around a discussion of the following checklist:

• Do you know who in your organisation(s) to highlight issues to if you are concerned about legal or compliance issues?
• Can your students raise issues or complaints? Do they feel that they can and that they will be respected? 
• Are you aware of the requirements under consumer law, including to treat students in a way that is transparent and fair?
• Do students who also take on employment at your organisation have a written record of that work?
• Does your organisation have appropriate measures to record family, medical and additional leave, and do you monitor this to ensure leave is used appropriately?
• If ​“yes” or ​“we’re working on it”, how do you record family, medical and additional leave?
• Do you provide extensions to students when eligible under the new rules?
• Changes to mode of study (e.g. part time). Can your students change mode of study more than once if required, are you aware that under UKRI’s rules, an institution can offer options other than 50% or 100% FTE?
• Do you know the personal characteristics protected by law, the protections in place against harassment and victimisation, and protection when students are pregnant or in a period of maternity?
• Does your organisation have a policy in place to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students and do you know how to use it?
• Does your organisation’s policy on reasonable adjustments for disabled students set out 
  when it is appropriate to ask students for information about their health or disability?
• Do you uprate the stipend on or around 1 October each year?

Ewan acknowledged that the culture change is difficult but emphasised that liability lay with universities, so it was important that people were aware of the requirements. ​“One of the things we’re looking at is supporting you by having much clearer systems. If you feel you are not going to be compliant [with the regulations] then please get in touch. We technically have the right to impose sanctions, but we try not to,” he said. He also encouraged attendees to sign-up to receive bitesize information on the changes from UKRI via email (form linked below).

After a short break, Dr Chris Day and Tom Webb (Coventry University) presented the first member spotlight session, which Susanna described as an ​“opportunity to celebrate the innovative practice you are carrying out or to foreground a challenge.” 

The speakers’ presentation, entitled Post-Viva Support for PGRs, gave an overview of some developments at Coventry University regarding post-viva support. Dr Day explained that his research across UK universities had revealed that little support was available for PhD students after the viva stage. He spoke to PGRs who were at the corrections stage to find out what their experiences were like and discovered that they felt ​“like they’d been dropped off a cliff”. 

Dr Day went on to explain: “[At Coventry] we tried to change things a little bit at the time – contacting the students to say: ​‘We are here to give you support if you need it’. We realised the supervisory element was something else that we needed to look at. There was a lot of inconsistency due to lack of clarity about how students could be supported with their corrections.”

Tom, who is also involved with the project, added: ​“We had around 40 participants from across ten institutions. We provided a forum for sharing experiences because it can be quite an isolating moment. There is an uncertain understanding of visas for international PGRs, so our next steps are to work with our visa teams to make that clear. We’re still at an early stage but we’re keen to build more resources and support for PGRs.”

After the presentations had concluded, attendees engaged in a group discussion about coping with organisational change.