Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership

The UK Research Councils are funding a new generation of doctoral students through the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership, a consortium of universities that will train PhD researchers across the social sciences. This matters because the UK needs a steady pipeline of highly skilled researchers who can tackle complex social and economic challenges—from inequality and public health to digital transformation and climate adaptation. Doctoral training partnerships provide structured, interdisciplinary environments where students develop expertise that single-institution programmes often cannot offer. The Grand Union partnership brings together multiple universities to pool resources, share supervisory expertise, and offer students access to a broader range of methods and datasets than any one institution could provide alone. If successful, this programme will produce researchers who go on to work in universities, government, think tanks, and industry—shaping policy, improving public services, and informing business decisions. The immediate output is trained people, not a specific technology or product. This is fundamentally an investment in human capital: the knowledge and skills these doctoral students acquire will influence how the UK understands and responds to societal problems for decades to come.