Kings College London ESRC Doctoral Training Centre DTG 2011

This grant funds doctoral training partnerships, not a specific research project. It provides the infrastructure for postgraduate students to pursue PhDs across the social sciences. The problem it addresses is a structural one: how to train the next generation of researchers. Without coordinated funding, individual universities struggle to offer the breadth of supervision, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and professional development that high-quality doctoral training requires. This grant creates a network—a consortium of research organisations—that pools expertise and resources. If the training centre succeeds, the impact will be indirect but long-lasting. It will produce skilled researchers who go on to work in universities, government, think tanks, and industry. Their work may eventually shape education policy, improve public services, or inform economic decision-making. The immediate output is not a discovery or a product, but people: trained specialists capable of generating knowledge across the social sciences for decades to come. This is fundamental capacity-building for the UK research base, not a project with a single practical application.