The South East Doctoral Training Arc (SEDarc)

The South East Doctoral Training Arc (SEDarc) will fund and coordinate postgraduate research training across a consortium of universities in South East England. This matters because the UK needs a steady pipeline of skilled social scientists to address complex societal challenges—from economic inequality to public health to climate adaptation. Currently, doctoral training is fragmented across individual institutions, which can limit students' access to diverse expertise, interdisciplinary collaboration, and shared resources. SEDarc consolidates training across multiple research organisations, creating a single, coordinated framework for PhD students in the social sciences. If successful, the partnership will produce a cohort of researchers better equipped to tackle real-world problems through cross-institutional supervision, shared training programmes, and industry placements. The impact is indirect but structural: stronger social science research capacity feeds into better-informed policy, more effective public services, and improved understanding of human behaviour in areas like education, work, and migration. This is a training infrastructure project, not a discovery science project—its success is measured not by a single breakthrough, but by the quality and breadth of the researchers it produces over the coming decade.