If we think about research as a means of driving innovation and by extension economic growth, there is a need to consider the lives of the people who are doing the research.
The UK has a significant strength in the quality and diversity of its higher education system – which trains a large proportion of the staff who end up working in universities (and elsewhere) performing research. We should, in other words, be better than we are at sustaining and shaping research capacity through supporting the people who contribute research throughout their careers.
Certainly, that’s the case that the University and College Union makes in last week’s research staff manifesto – noting that nearly two thirds of research staff are on fixed term contracts, following research funding and strategic decisions around the country at a significant detriment to their personal lives and professional development.
How does the system work?
Precarity is not an accident of the system – it is the entire design of the system. Becoming a postdoc is not the final stage of the undergraduate to postgraduate to researcher pipeline: it is a step into a new system where the trial of job-hopping, house moving, city shifting work, may one day lead to a full time post.
The first step after undertaking a doctorate is, unsurprisingly post-doctoral work – the postdoc. The term is confusing as it implies simply the job someone does after being awarded a PhD. Over time the taxonomy has changed to take on a specific meaning. It has become synonymous with precarious employment tied to grant funding. As an example, Imperial College London describes their postdocs as follows
- a member of staff who will have a PhD, and be employed to undertake research
- commonly on an externally funded grant secured by their principal investigator (PI) e.g. Research Council standard grant
- responsible for their own career development but entitled to the support of their PI and the PFDC
- entitled to 10 days development per year
- entitled to 25 days leave plus bank holidays and college closure dates (if full time, pro-rata for part time)
- entitled to regular one-to-one meetings with their line manager
- entitled to a mid and final probation review
- entitled to a Personal Review and Development Plan (PRDP) meeting once per year
Crucially, in the section which describes what a postdoc is not, it includes being “a permanent member of academic staff.”
This is often the case because postdocs are tied to grant funding and grant funding is limited to a certain period of time to cover a specific project. UKRI, for example, does not fund postdocs directly but funds research organisations directly through a mix of focused studentships and capacity funding. Research organisations then fund postdocs.
This means that the flexible deployment of resources is the very start of the system. It’s not an accident or a quirk, it is that the UK’s research system is built around incentivising human capital to move to the organisations and places that most closely aligns to their research skills. The upside of this is that, in theory, it should mean resources are efficiently deployed to the people and places that can use them most productively. In reality, it means that instability and structural barriers to progressing to full research contracts are the norm.
It’s not that UKRI are not aware of this problem. In a 2023 blog on team research Nik Ogryzko, Talent Programme Manager at UKRI, wrote that
We’ve built a system where research groups sometimes act as their own small business inside an institution. And this leads to a very particular set of weaknesses.
Employment contracts have become linked to individual research grants, with research staff often highly dependent on their principal investigator for career progression, or even their continued employment.
Group leaders are often not equipped to support their staff into anything other than an academic career, and we know most research staff do not end up there.
We also know such precarious employment and power imbalances can in some cases lead to bullying, harassment and discrimination. Such structural factors further compromise the integrity of our research, despite the strong intrinsic motivation of our researchers and innovators.“
A number of institutions are signatories to The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers. When it comes to the use of fixed-term contracts the concordat states that
[…]some of the areas of most concern to researchers, such as the prevalence of fixed-term contracts and enforced mobility, will require long term systemic changes, which can only be realised through collective action across stakeholders.
Again, should a researcher be lucky enough to pass through their postdoc a permanent role is not guaranteed or even the norm. In reading through the websites of universities the reasons for fixed term contracts are various including; to align with grant-funding, to cover peak demand, to meet uncertain demand, to cover staff absence, to cover time-limited projects, secondments, training, and to bring in specialist skills.
It is not that universities don’t recognise the issue of fixed term contracts, institutions like the University of Exeter has a whole framework on the appropriate use of these contacts, it’s that in a funding system which places a premium on project working it is necessary to have a highly flexible staff force.
However, this does not mean that this system is inevitable or that the number of fixed term contracts is desirable.
What is going on?
According to HESA data, that number is slowly falling – both numerically and proportionally – for research only academic staff. As of the 2023-24 academic year, 63.9 per cent of “research only” academic staff (64,265) are on a fixed term contract. This sounds like a lot, but it is down slightly from a peak of 68 per cent (70,050) in 2019-20.
The proportion of fixed term contracts for teaching only academics (another prominent early career route, often coupled with weekends at the kitchen table writing literature reviews for publication in an attempt to bolster credentials for a research job in an underfunded field) is also on a downward trajectory. Some 44.3 per cent of teaching only contracts (equating to 64,300 people) were fixed term in 2019-20 – by 2023-24 the numbers were 35.7 per cent and 63,425.
If we take this to provider level we can see that a significant research focus is no predictor of a reliance on fixed term contracts. This chart shows the proportion of all academic staff on research only contracts on the y axis, with the proportion of all academic staff on fixed term contracts on the x axis.
What this chart shows is that a strong focus on research (with many research only academic contracts) does not predict a reliance on fixed term contracts – indeed, there are many providers with a significant proportion of fixed term contracts that have no research only academic staff at all. While a fixed term contract is a poor basis on which to plan long term as an individual, for many higher education institutions it is a useful answer to wildly varying income and recruitment. Whereas for more traditional institutions it makes sense to maintain capacity even as prevailing conditions worsen, in smaller and more precarious providers unutilised capacity is a luxury that is no longer as affordable.
If you look back to the first chart, you may notice a “salary source” filter. One of the prevailing narratives around fixed term contracts is that these necessarily link to the “fixed term” nature of funded research projects – the argument being that once the money is finished, the staff need to find new jobs. In fact, this is less of a factor than you might imagine: the proportions of research only academic staff on fixed term contracts is higher for externally funded than those funded internally, but the difference isn’t huge.
Plotting the same data another way shows us that around a quarter of research only salaries are funded entirely by the higher education provider, with a further five per cent or so partially supported by the host institution – these figures are slightly lower for fixed-term research only staff, but only very slightly.
So we can be clear that fixed term salaries are (broadly) a research thing, but there’s not really evidence to suggest that short term external funding is the whole reason for this.
As a quick reminder, the research councils represent about a quarter of all external research funding, with the UK government (in various forms) and the NHS representing about another (swiftly growing)fifth. That’s a hefty chunk of research income that comes from sources that the government has some degree of control over – and some of the language used by Labour before the election about making this more reliable (the ten year settlements of legend) was seen as a recognition of the way funding could be reprofiled to allow for more “livable” research careers and an expansion of research capacity.
This chart also allows you to examine the way these proportions land differently by provider and subject area (expressed here as HESA cost code). The volatility is higher at smaller providers, as you might expect – while research in the arts and humanities is more likely to be funded by research councils than in STEM or social sciences. But it is really the volume, rather than the source, of research funding that determines how researcher salaries are paid.
Although the established pathway from research postgraduate to research is by no means the only one available (many postgraduate research students do not become academics) it is an established maxim – dating back to the post-war Percy and Barlow reviews – that to produce the researchers we need requires training in the form of postgraduate research provision.
Although it’s not really the purpose of this article, it is worth considering the subject and provider level distribution of postgraduate research students in the light of how funding and capacity for research is distributed. As the early research career is often dominated by the need to move to take on a fixed term contract, one way to address this might be to have research career opportunities and research students in the same place from the start.
What can we learn from this?
Research capacity, and – for that matter – research training capacity, can’t be turned off and on at a whim. Departments and research centres need more than one short-term funded project to begin delivering for the UK at their full potential, because developing capacity and expertise takes time and experience. That’s a part of the reason why we have non-ringfenced funding: streams like those associated with QR in England – to keep research viable between projects, and to nurture developing expertise so it can contribute meaningfully to national, regional, and industrial research priorities. It’s funds like these that support researcher training and supervision, and the infrastructure and support staff and components that make research possible.
But what the data suggests is that while the short-term nature of project funding does have an impact, especially at smaller providers and emerging research centres, there are many universities that are able to sustain research employment between projects. A part of this is bound to be sheer scale, but it doesn’t happen at all large research performing organisations by any stretch of the imagination. A part of the answer then, must be the strategic decisions and staffing priorities that makes sustaining researcher employment possible.
That’s not to let the funding side of the equation off the hook either. There is a sense that the Labour party was moving in the right direction in considering longer term research funding settlements – but we have yet to learn how this will work in practice. By its very nature, research is discovery and opportunity led: a few years ago artificial intelligence research was a minor academic curiosity, currently it is big money – but will it be a priority in 2035? Could there be some areas – medical and healthcare research, large scale physics, engineering – where we can be more sure than others?
You’ll note we didn’t mention the arts, humanities, and social sciences in that list – but these may be some of the most valuable areas of human activity, and government-supported research plays a more prominent role in sustaining not just discovery and innovation but the actual practice of such activity. Such is the paucity of money available in the arts that many practitioners subsidise their practice with research and teaching – and it feels like arts funding more generally needs consideration.
Sure, the UK punches above its weight in the sciences and in health care – but in arts, heritage, and social policy the work of the UK is genuinely world leading. It has a significant economic impact (second only to financial services) too. Research funding is a part of the picture here, but a long term commitment to these industries would be one of the most valuable decisions a government can make.
What are the other choices?
The fundamental challenge is maintaining a system which is dynamic, where the dynamism is not solely reliant on a highly transient workforce. A simple, albeit extremely limited, conclusion from the data would be that there is too great a supply of researchers to meet the demand for their skills.
The more important question is what is the value of such a highly educated workforce and how can society make the most of their talents. This is not to say the UK should operate a supply led model. A world where funding is allocated based purely on the academic interests of researchers might be good for placing emphasis on intellectual curiosity but it would not allow funders to match social and economic priorities with researcher’s work. Put another way, it isn’t sufficient to tackle climate change by hoping enough researchers are interested in doing so. It would also not necessarily create more permanent jobs – just different ones.
Conversely, a system which is largely demand led loses talent in other ways. The sheer exhaustion of moving between jobs and tacking research skills to different projects in the same field means stamina, not just research ability, is a key criterion for success. This means researchers whose abilities are needed are not deployed because their personal incentive for a more stable life trumps their career aspirations.
The current system does penalise those who cannot work flexibly for extended periods of time, but more fundamentally the incentives in the system are misaligned to what it hopes to achieve. There can be no dynamism without some flexibility, but flexibility should be demonstrable not permanently designed. Flexibility of employment should be used to achieve a research benefit not only an administrative one.
This is not wholly in the gift of universities. A careful consideration by government, funders, institutions, and researchers, of how flexibility should be used is the key to balance in the system. There are times where the research system requires stability. For example, the repeated use of fixed term contracts on the same topic is a clear market signal for more stable employment. Furthermore, it is undesirable to have a forever changing workforce in areas governments have singularly failed to make progress on for decades. Nobody is arguing that if only research into productivity was a bit more transient the UK’s economies woes could be fixed.
The need is coordinated action. And unlike in Australia there is no single review of what the research ecosystem is for. Until then as priorities change, funders work on short time horizons, and institutions respond to ever changing incentives, the downstream effect is a workforce that will be treated as entirely changeable too.
