Across the sector, work focused on equity has become more contested, more scrutinised – and, for some colleagues, more personally risky.
In that context, collaboration isn’t just beneficial, it’s becoming essential. Not only can cross-sector working produce stronger, more credible outputs, it can also distribute risk, offering a degree of protection and collective confidence to those taking this work forward.
For research funding, this presents a particular challenge. Decisions about who gets to apply, how opportunities are allocated, and what counts as fair process are increasingly shaped by scarcity, complexity, and institutional caution.
In the current global climate around EDI, there is a growing sense that sticking one’s institutional head above the parapet carries an unwelcome level of risk, while working collectively can help build a little more bravery into the system.
Collaboration under pressure
One response to this challenge has been to create spaces where institutions can step briefly out of competition and work collectively on shared problems. In early 2024, the University of Oxford convened a cross-sector forum bringing together research funders and universities to explore how recommendations from its work on equity in research funding might be taken forward in practice. The premise was simple: what might become possible if institutions paused competition long enough to rethink how it operates?
What followed was not just a set of outputs, but a sustained experiment in collaborative working under pressure. Two priorities emerged quickly from this work: inclusive demand management, and the use of positive action in research funding and careers. Neither is new, but both have become harder to navigate in a funding landscape defined by scarcity, heightened scrutiny, and institutional caution.
Demand management – limiting the number of applications that can be submitted – forces organisations into choices about who gets to compete at all. Positive action, meanwhile, offers one route to addressing persistent inequalities but is frequently constrained by legal uncertainty and a high degree of perceived risk.
In both cases, the challenge is not simply technical. It is shaped by judgement, confidence, and the conditions in which decisions are made. It was here that the value of working collectively became most visible – and where trust, flexibility and care proved as important as shared priorities.
Lessons learned
First, collaboration helped to distribute and make sense of risk. Questions around legality, fairness, and proportionality are often navigated cautiously within individual organisations, particularly where reputational stakes feel high. Working across institutions created space to test assumptions, surface shared concerns, and build more confident, risk-aware approaches. What might feel difficult or exposed in one organisation became more manageable when approached collectively.
Second, it enabled a level of openness that can be hard to sustain locally. In a more contested environment, some colleagues feel unable to share examples of practice or to be publicly associated with EDI work. A cross-sector setting, grounded in trust and shared purpose, made it easier to acknowledge uncertainty, learn from partial or imperfect approaches, and draw on a wider base of experience than any single institution could offer. Even within these collaborative communities, some contributors chose not to be named on outputs – noting fear of potential repercussions on them personally.
Third, it created the conditions for sustained progress, rather than isolated effort. Momentum in this kind of work depends on more than goodwill. Regular engagement, shared ownership, and visible progress between meetings helped turn intention into output. Crucially, this was underpinned by a realistic understanding of scope: the aim was not to resolve inequity in research funding in its entirety, but to produce practical tools that organisations could use within their own contexts.
What emerged from this process were two substantive, sector-facing resources: guidance on inclusive demand management, and a framework for positive action in research funding and research careers. Their significance lies not only in their content, but in what they represent; an example of how collaboration can make progress possible in areas where individual institutions might otherwise hesitate.
At a time when work on equity is becoming more contested and more cautious, the risk is not just that progress slows, but that it quietly stalls altogether. If acting alone increasingly feels untenable, then collaboration is not just a route to better practice, it is a condition for making progress at all. The challenge now is not whether we value collective action, but whether we are prepared to invest in it as a sustained and necessary way of advancing EDI in higher education.
The author would like to thank Claire Edwards, Strategic Research Development Manager (Research Growth) at the University of Nottingham, Ipshita Ghose, Head of Research Strategy and Development at the University of Birmingham, Fiona McClement, University Lead for EDI at the University of Edinburgh, and Faye Robinson, Associate Director Research Development at the University of York.
The report under the link “positive action in research funding and research careers” gives a summary of the Richardson versus York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust case which was about a Leadership Programme advertised as being for BME staff. This summary does not seem to accurately reflect the case. The link in the report to personneltoday contains:
“a white colleague attended the course, and facilitators and managers of the same skin colour Richardson were involved in both in-person and online sessions. In the round, the tribunal concluded that skin-colour-based segregation was not deliberately enacted, even if the wording of the literature had given that impression. It also explored how the Trust would have responded to objections to a white colleague attending. The director of workforce and organisational development, Ms McMeekin, stated that any colleague objecting on that basis would face disciplinary action. ”
This quite clearly indicates that running a leadership programme which is segregated by ethnicity is unlawful discrimination rather than lawful positive action. The report gives the opposite impression.
The positive action cases from the report, by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Nottingham BBSRC Doctoral Training Partnership, as described in the report were skin-colour-based segregation and would, given the above judgement described in personneltoday, presumably therefore by unlawful discrimination.
I think there is a lot hiding behind the euphemisms in this article. The author uses terms such as “contested,” “scrutinised,” “institutional caution,” and “reputational risk” without explaining what objections to EDI work are being made or whether any of them might be legitimate. Likewise, the article speaks in euphemistic terms about “legal uncertainty” and “perceived risk” without spelling out the relevant legal questions. The rationale for collaboration is to “distribute risk” and have institutions “offer each other a degree of protection”. In the light of recent news stories might be this be better read as “closing ranks to make controversial policies harder to challenge”?
The report linked under “positive action in research funding and research careers” in the article does say quite a bit about these issues (and in less euphemistic language). Warning: reading it might raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels.
Thanks for pointing this out. A lot of the report is concerned with disarming and countering opposition to positive action (supposedly different from positive discrimination) because the authors know it is unpopular and controversial. Thank goodness that many people are still instinctively opposed to discrimination based on race and gender, despite the unproven sophistries deployed in its support.
Positive Action only ever goes one way. If underrepresentation in the “wrong” direction is noted, then no Positive Action is taken. In fact, underrepresentation in the “wrong” direction is not even allowed to be mentioned. I would give evidence for this claim, but wonkhe removes that (which is evidence itself).