There’s new research on how PGR students are supervised
Mack Marshall is Wonkhe SUs’ Community and Policy Officer
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There’s notably no clear regulation on the postgraduate research (PGRs) student experience. PGRs in England are supposed to be “covered” by the Office for Students’ B conditions – but there isn’t anything specific to their experience and they are silent on supervision.
There’s also no access and participation plan for postgraduates. Regulation isn’t always the lever for a better student experience but it does cement some elements of rights which are either currently missing or feel at best vague.
UKCGE ran its UK research supervision survey in 2021 with a sample of over 3,000 and repeated it in 2024, this time with 5,174 responses from across 141 UK institutions. Whilst the sample size is larger, it is difficult to note how many research supervisors there are in the UK to gauge validity.
The survey has lots of findings on workload, motivations and challenges as a supervisor. It also drills down into supervisor confidence levels and what respondents understood as within or outside of their remits.
On the topic of mental health and wellbeing, there’s findings on both confidence and on role and perception – only 76 per cent felt confident to respond to mental health and wellbeing needs, signposting candidates to further support where appropriate, and a similar percentage felt that responding to mental health and wellbeing needs was part of the role. We’d have to assume that the circles on that venn heavily overlap.
Thinking about the other roles and responsibilities of a doctoral supervisor, 93 per cent agreed that training and professional development was in their remit, and 80 per cent agreed pastoral support was in their remit.
If there was a breakdown in the supervisory relationship, over 1 in 10 aren’t aware of what to do. 75 per cent agreed they knew what their institution’s policies were, but 12 per cent disagreed and 13 per cent responded neither.
The survey asked about the challenges faced by research supervisors: 20 per cent said mental health and personal issues faced by candidates, 17 per cent said candidate financial issues and 17 per cent said candidates’ lack of time – potentially those last two are connected.
Despite these forming key challenges in their supervision experience, many did not see this as within their role and didn’t feel confident responding to it.
The report is able to demonstrate a correlation where mandatory new supervisor training existed at institutions, the level of agreement with skills and understandings like supervising candidates from diverse backgrounds, awareness of policies and procedures if there was a relationship breakdown or signposting to mental health and wellbeing needs increased.
When it comes to the PGR student experience, mental health and wellbeing is clearly a priority, yet this research tells us there is sometimes a lack of confidence amongst supervisors and no clear expectations set on what support should be available from the regulator.
Mandatory supervisor training is evidenced here as a clear way to build that confidence and increase signposting and support. With few cemented rights identified by the regulator in any part of the UK’s quality systems, it makes it harder for PGRs to be confident in what expectations are when it comes to supervision.
A particular challenge for institutions here is the inherent variation in the nature of the PGR experience, including the relationship with supervisor, between disciplines. In some fields a PhD student means an apprentice who spends many hours each week talking and working one-to-one or side-by-side with their supervisor. In other (esp. lab-based) disciplines the official supervisor can be a remote senior figure seen only in occasional formal meetings, with day-to-day supervision delegated to more junior members of the supervisor’s group. These models have their own very different benefits, challenges and risks, and our experience (as a Russell Group STEM department) is that attempts at institution-level and even faculty-level training fail to engage supervisors, because the scenarios they present are too removed from lived experiences in our department. That’s not to doubt the importance of training, but I wonder if there is a role here for learned societies and similar to provide more discipline-appropriate training at national level, rather than institutions trying to create one-size-fits-all courses and ending up with one-size-fits-none.