Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership

The UK Research Councils are funding a network of doctoral training partnerships to produce the next generation of social science researchers. This grant supports the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership, a consortium led by a single organisation that coordinates postgraduate training across multiple institutions. The problem it addresses is straightforward: the UK needs a steady pipeline of skilled researchers who can tackle complex social and economic questions. Without coordinated training, individual universities may struggle to provide the breadth of expertise, supervision, and resources that high-quality doctoral education requires. If this succeeds, the partnership will train dozens of PhD students over several years. These researchers will go on to work in universities, government, think tanks, and industry, where they will apply rigorous social science methods to real-world problems—from understanding inequality to improving public services. The impact is indirect but cumulative: better-trained researchers produce more reliable evidence, which in turn informs better policy and practice. This is primarily a capacity-building grant, not a single research project with a specific discovery goal. It is fundamental investment in the research workforce itself. Past investments of this kind have produced researchers who later shaped fields such as behavioural economics, education policy, and data science—fields that now quietly underpin how governments design programmes and how businesses understand their customers.