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Doctoral training partnerships funding call (DTP2) – Town hall meeting

When: 30 January 2018
Where: London

On 19 October 2017, NERC announced that its second round of investment in doctoral training partnerships (DTP2) would be made through a fully open competitive call. This decision was made following the outcomes of the mid-term evaluation of NERC’s existing DTPs in 2016-17.

The DTP evaluation concluded that this mechanism of delivering PhD studentships provides valuable training and that NERC should continue to support PhD studentships in this way. A fully open competitive call will ensure that they build on the success of existing investments while enabling innovation and change within the DTP community. It will ensure that all eligible organisations are able to compete for access to NERC studentships based on excellence, determined by a robust and consistent assessment process.

The DTP2 call will be launched in early January 2018, at which point an announcement of opportunity will be published on the NERC website. To ensure clear communication regarding the scope and expectations of this call, NERC will be holding a town hall meeting for interested parties to discuss the call in more detail with NERC staff and to network with potential DTP partners. The meeting will take place once the call has been launched.

The event

The purpose of the town hall meeting is to provide an opportunity for those interested in applying to the DTP2 call to receive detailed guidance about the scope and requirements of the call, raise any questions with NERC staff and network with prospective DTP partners. The meeting will commence with a presentation from NERC staff, followed by a plenary question and answer session, and will conclude with an open session to include lunch and networking.

Those expressing an interest in attending will be invited to propose questions to be addressed at the meeting – this will enable NERC staff to tailor the content of presentations and ensure that they address as many commonly asked questions as possible. Common queries raised following the publication of the call will also be addressed at the meeting.

Following the presentations and Q&A, the meeting will be unstructured, providing an opportunity for attendees to network with one another and discuss potential partnerships, as well as to talk further with NERC staff regarding specific questions.

Attendance at this meeting is not a pre-requisite for submission of a DTP2 proposal. A summary report of the meeting will be published on the NERC website as soon as possible after the event.

How to apply

To express your interest in attending the meeting, you must complete the online registration form.

The closing date for registration is 16:00 on 1 December 2017.

There are a limited number of places available and so the submission of an application is not a guarantee of a place at the meeting. If the event is oversubscribed, NERC will limit the number of attendees per organisation to allow for even representation from across the NERC community – this will be done in discussion with the individuals and organisation, as appropriate. Those applicants offered a place will receive a formal invitation confirming attendance once all applications have been processed. NERC will aim to confirm the final list of attendees by early January 2018.

Contact

NERC Research Careers

15 Minutes to Develop your Research Career – Episode 2

Episode 2: Stepping up, moving on and alternative career paths for researchers

What do researchers go on to do after their PhD? What are the different career paths available? What are the transferable skills you develop as a researcher?

Careers consultant Kate Murray from Kings College London provides her advice, and also previous PhD students working outside of academia to get a taster of some of the different career paths researchers take.

Download the podcast here. Taylor & Francis Group created with Vitae.

Standing up for Science workshop for STEM & social science early career researchers

Sense about Science is holding a Standing up for Science workshop at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society on Thursday 30 November 2017. This full day event is for STEM and social science early career researchers (PhD students, post-doctoral fellows or equivalent).

Want to find out how to make your voice heard in public debates about science?

Image result for voice of young science workshop

At this workshop, you will meet researchers who promote science in the face of hostility and are recognised for their achievements, learn from respected science journalists about how the media works, how to respond and comment, and what journalists want and expect from scientists.

These workshops are very popular and places are limited.

To apply, please complete the application form and email Rachel Bowen (rbowen@bournemouth.ac.uk) to let her know that you wish to attend.

Closing date for applications: Monday 13 November, 5pm.

 

Image result for sense about science workshop

For more details about the workshop, get in touch with Ana Skamarauskas (ana@senseaboutscience.org).

Deadline Approaching – Call for Something: Disrupting Research Practices

The Doctoral College and Centre for Research Capability and Development  at Coventry University will be holding a one day conference happening on Friday 19th January 2018. Our Call for Something is currently open and closes on 12th November. For more information on the event and the full CFS, please follow the link:

https://sway.com/SeG6cezMbHXXh8FY?ref=Lin

For further details, please contact Dr Kieran Fenby-Hulse 

The power of Bilding!


I was lucky, and honoured, in late October to visit Vechta, Lower Saxony, to give a keynote at the Gemeinsame Werte in Europa? (Common values in Europe?) conference as part of a European-wide celebration of 30 years of Erasmus funding and exchanges. Having acted as part of a European-wide panel on the future of Erasmus – especially post-Brexit – my keynote address dealt with the challenges of ‘precarity’ for many of our citizens throughout Europe and the need for radical social action to confront the increasing insecurities, uncertainties and inequities within contemporary society. It was a plea for European solidarity and action against neoliberal atomisation and its debilitating effects on the communitas, something that resonated with the European and international audience.

Last week my colleague from Universität Vechta, Magnus Frampton, continued the dialogue begun in Germany by offering an important seminar ‘What’s in a word? Bildung and pedagogy: two German understandings of education’ which explored, amongst other things, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s legacy to education. This was important in reminding us that education specifically focusing on the requirements of the economy or business is potentially damaging to the individual. It reminds us that the human and the social is central.

So, as we contribute to developing education, meaning and society, not as a linear project of the enlightenment but as a means of cultivating the self and the social and in shaping and creating anew who we are as human beings, we need to challenge and to question, to resist and make new rather than to be moulded as economic units for those with power. Long may the potential of Erasmus offer this academic freedom!

Jonathan Parker

British Library – Doctoral Open Days 2017/18

The British Library is running a series of Open Days for Doctoral Students, taking place in December 2017 as well as January and February 2018. The Doctoral Open Days are a chance for PhD students who are new to the Library to discover the British Library’s unique research materials. All events take place in the British Library Conference Centre at St Pancras, London, except for the event on Wednesday 31 January 2018, which takes place at the Library’s site in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. For further details of the all Open Days and how to book please visit the website. Places cost £10.00 including lunch and other refreshments.

 

BU welcomes the ERASMUS+ Research Team

On the 25th-27th October 2017, Dr Ben Hicks (Psychology and ADRC) and Professor Wen Tang (Department of Creative Technology) welcomed the ERASMUS+ project team to Bournemouth University. The team consisted of practitioners based at Alzheimer’s Valencia, Alzheimer’s Greece, Alzheimer’s Slovenia, Alzheimer’s Romania and IBV. Since October 2016, thanks to funding from the European Commission, the team has been developing an e-training platform to promote the use of Serious Games with people with dementia. This meeting-the third since the project began- enabled the research team to present the work they had been undertaking within their associated countries and discuss the next stages of the project. This included:

  • Selecting and evaluating a range of Serious Games with people with dementia and their care partners;
  • Creating guidance information on using the Serious Games; and
  • Developing training materials for health practitioners wishing to use the e-training platform

The e-training platform is beginning to take shape, although the training materials are not yet publically available. If you would like to access the web platform it can be found at: http://adgaming.ibv.org/

Although the meetings were long (and the discussions incredibly fruitful), the research team still had time to visit BU facilities and live the student experience for a day. This included having lunch within the Fusion Building canteen, undertaking Virtual Reality Navigational testing within the Psychology labs and buying two-for-one pints in Dylans at the end of the day!

The next project meeting will take place in Bucharest, Romania, in February 2018, where plans to disseminate and evaluate the training delivered to health practitioners will be discussed.

Welcoming the research team

The meetings begin

Experiencing student life at Dylans

Tags:

Photo of the Week: Tracks in the sand- tracking criminals

Tracks in the sand: tracking criminals

Tracks in the sand: tracking criminals

Our next instalment of the ‘Photo of the Week’ series features Professor Matthew Bennett’s image footprints in the sand, which represents his research into tracking criminals.  The series is a weekly instalment, which features an image taken by our fantastic BU staff and students. The photos give a glimpse into some of the fascinating work our researchers have been doing across BU and the wider community.

Within our lives we leave thousands of individual footprints – in the snow, on the beach, in the park and sometimes even muddy prints on the kitchen floor!  Tracks are more numerous than any other form of trace evidence, and record a unique snap shot in time about the track-maker.  Not only do they record details of the shoes worn, but information about our body mass, style of walking and the specific wear on the soles of our shoes that record information about the history of our footfall.  Reading these clues digitally provides an important forensic tools and HEIF-funded BU research (www.DigTrace.co.uk) in this area is shaping forensic practice both in the UK and overseas.

If you’d like find out more about the research or the photo itself then please contact Professor Bennett.

This photo was originally an entry in the 2017 Research Photography Competition. If you have any other questions about the Photo of the Week series or the competition please email research@bournemouth.ac.uk

HE policy update w/e 3rd November 2017

Influencing factors – where to work and study

UPP have released Skills to Pay the Bills: How students pick where to study and where to work. In the report they consider decision making at application stage, the relative importance of employability and which factors drive graduation retention in the area.

  • 70% of students said they would have been influenced by a university’s TEF score when selecting where to study (last year 84% said they would have been influenced by TEF – UPP suggest the decrease is that students have lost confidence in the TEF as a tool to help them differentiate between institutions). 58% of students declared they would not pay more fees to study at a gold or silver institution, however, applicants to Russell Group providers were more willing to pay an increased fee
  • More students (+6%) were aware of apprenticeships than in previous years. 30% say that they genuinely considered undertaking an apprenticeship before committing to their undergraduate degree. However, many decided against an apprenticeship because they thought it would limit their future career choices.
  • 40% of students were prepared to pay more (£2,000+ more) in fees if their degree guaranteed them a job with a salary minimum above £24,000 upon graduation. Students prioritised investment in employability programmes and work experience over research investment spend in institutions. Across all responses it was clear students feel vulnerable and are seeking future security – they are carefully weighing up whether they will benefit from the graduate premium
  • Students relocate after graduating for economic reasons – the perception of prosperity and sufficient graduate opportunities were the most significant factor to retain graduates within the area. The report recommends universities that aim to retain more graduate talent should work to increase the amount of graduate employment locally and effectively communicate these opportunities. For example, pairing students and recent graduates with local businesses.
    The second most influential factor was the availability of affordable accommodation. The golden handcuffs are areas which combine good graduate employment, affordable accommodation, and an attractive ‘look and feel’ to the local area (see map diagram on following page)

Read the concluding remarks and the recommendations for universities on page 15.

Universities must be careful to ensure that they act in ways that cement the personal, institutional and civic bargain embodied by higher education. Focusing on employability, opportunity and retention is a vital part of that bargain.

The above report was compiled from data collected in the UPP Annual Student Experience Survey. Click here for a deeper dive into the wider survey’s data and infometrics.

HE trends, facts and figures

UUK have published Higher Education in Facts and Figures 2017 which provides headline data on students, staff and finances. UUK describe their highlights:

  • In 2017 overall student satisfaction at UK HE institutions was 84%
  • University applications from 18 year olds in areas of England with lower HE participation rates have increased to record levels (part time students continue to decline)
  • Employment rates and median salaries continue to be higher for graduates than for non-graduates
  • Just under a quarter of total university income comes from direct UK government sources
  • 16% of research income comes from sources outside of the UK
  • The report stresses the diversity of students, the UK is the second most popular destination behind America and 14% of undergraduates, 38% of postgraduates, and 29% of academic staff are from outside the UK (of which 17% EU). Almost a quarter of senior lecturers and 18% of professors are non-UK nationals. 45% of the academic workforce are female.

Industrial Strategy

The Industrial Strategy Commission published their Final Report recommending a complete overhaul of the Government’s initial plans. They recommended the Industrial Strategy be owned by all and be “rethought as a broad, long-term and non-partisan commitment to strategic management of the economy… [it] must be an ambitious long-term plan with a positive vision for the UK.

Dr Craig Berry (Sheffield Political Economy research Institute): “Industrial strategy isn’t just about supporting a small number of sectors. It should focus on big strategic challenges like decarbonisation and population ageing – and ultimately it should aim to make material differences to people’s everyday lives. This will mean rethinking how government makes policies and chooses its investments.”

Recommendations:

  • A powerful industrial strategy division should be established within the Treasury to catalyse all other departments to devise and implement policies consistent with the industrial strategy. The ambition should be to achieve positive outcomes and make a material difference to people’s everyday lives. They propose overhauling current decision making on large strategic projects to take into account the effect on people’s lives. In the trade-off between economic efficiency and the equitable treatment of communities it is right for fairness to communities take priority in some cases
  • The new UK Research and Innovation agency (UKRI) should inform, and be informed by, the proposed new industrial strategy division. The UKRI board should have a high-level advisory committee including representatives from all three Devolved Administrations, and from key local authorities with devolution deals.
  • A new independent expert body – The Office for Strategic Economic Management – was proposed to monitor and measure the long-term success of the new strategy. It should be created on the model of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility
  • The new strategy should commit to providing what they call “Universal Basic Infrastructure”. All citizens in all places should be served by a good standard of physical infrastructure and have access to high quality and universal health and education services.
  • The report says that skills policy has suffered decades of damaging instability, and so policy makers and institutions should provide stability, including a cross-party consensus. Closer working and co-operation is required between the Department for Education and BEIS, national and local authorities, and the higher and further education funding and regulatory systems. Read section 2.4 The skills system from page 37 for more detail on this.
  • A long-term commitment to raise the R&D intensity of the economy, measured as the ratio of R&D spend, should be accompanied by a more detailed understanding of the whole innovation system. This will require intermediate milestones for both business and government/HE R&D intensity, supported by proposals for concrete interventions at a material scale, and with a new emphasis on demand-led initiatives to supplement the supply-side approach characteristic of the last 15 years of science and innovation policy. The new strategy should be designed with a comprehensive understanding of the whole R&D landscape and the relationships between its different parts. New institutions must have clarity of mission and be judged by the appropriate metrics. More on research and development on page 41, section 2.5 The research and innovation landscape.
  • The UK should seek to maintain and enhance the international character of its research system, including through future participation in EU Framework Programmes, for example through associate country status.
  • Health and social care must be central to the new industrial strategy. As well as offering potential for productivity gains and new markets, achieving better outcomes for people’s wellbeing must be placed at the centre of the strategy.
  • The new strategy should be organised around meeting the long-term strategic goals of the state. These include decarbonisation of the economy, investing in infrastructure and increasing export capacity.
  • Innovation policy should focus on using the state’s purchasing power to create new markets and drive demand for innovation in areas such as healthcare and low carbon energy. Harness the UK’s current world-class innovation by re-linking excellence in basic and applied research.
  • Place continues to remain central to the new strategy – an industrial strategy should not try to do everything everywhere, but it should seek to do something for everywhere. In 5 or 10 years’ time we should be able to pick anywhere in the UK and say how the strategy has helped that place, its people and industries. As most places perform below the UK average the strategy should push further and faster devolution. LEP boundaries should coincide with the appropriate economic geography.

Health and social care at the centre of industrial strategy

An effective, efficient and financially viable health and social care system, in the context of an ageing demography, is a key strategic goal for the UK. The new strategy must incorporate social care, public health, the NHS (as a market as well as a service), and the UK’s strong industrial sectors in pharma/life sciences and medical technology, as one whole system.

Future increases in public spending on health should come with the strict expectation that investment should be used to raise productivity. The provision of health and social care in all places means that even small productivity increases could have a significant impact.

The new industrial strategy should aim to achieve higher productivity and better health outcomes by ensuring more skilled and satisfying jobs in the health and social care sector. An urgent focus on redesigning training and education should aim to both raise the skills of existing employees and attract new people to the sector.

Health and social care services should be integrated, but this should be steered by the goal of achieving better outcomes for people’s wellbeing and not purely by reducing costs. This will lead to savings but not on a sufficient scale to meet the spending pressures of an ageing population. Lessons must be learned from the places which are now experimenting with health and social care integration to build the evidence base for how to achieve better outcomes.

Read more on Health & Social Care from page 64.

Goals

The report outlines what the UK’s 2017 goals should be:

  • Ensuring adequate investment in infrastructure
  • Decarbonisation of the energy economy
  • Developing a sustainable health and social care system.
  • Unlocking long-term investment
  • Supporting high-value industries and building export capacity
  • Enabling growth in all parts of the UK

Other news

Apprenticeships: DfE confirmed they will review level 4 and 5 technical education to ensure it better addresses the needs of learners and employers. This includes progression from the new T level which will be taught from 2020. Anne Milton (Apprenticeships and Skills Minister) said: “High quality technical education helps young people and adults get into new, fulfilling and better paid careers. That’s good for them and good for our economy. This is the way we build a better, higher skilled workforce.”

Getting your research into parliament: A new How to guide has been released. Here are there 10 top tips:

Making connections

  • Be seen online or at events, so it’s easy for us to find you
  • Blog your research so we know what you are working on
  • Follow what we are doing on the Parliament website and via Twitter
  • Sign up to POST, Commons and Lords Library, and Select Committee Alerts
  • Invite parliamentary staff to your events

Presenting research

  • Don’t just send your journal articles: send us a brief and include your sources
  • Be relevant: start with a summary and focus on how your research impacts people
  • Use visuals: a picture can paint a thousand words (and save time and space)
  • Be clear and accurate: be explicit about all limitations and caveats
  • Don’t forget the essentials: include your contact details and date your briefing

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JANE FORSTER                                            |                       SARAH CARTER

Policy Advisor                                                                     Policy & Public Affairs Officer

65111                                                                                 65070

Follow: @PolicyBU on Twitter                   |                       policy@bournemouth.ac.uk