Doctoral focal award plus: innovating in data-driven research

Doctoral focal award plus: innovating in data-driven research

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is commissioning one doctoral focal award plus to develop social scientists who can use data-driven research approaches in imaginative, rigorous ways. The call is open on the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Funding Service. ESRC must receive applications by 14 October 2026 at 4:00pm UK time. The official page says applications cannot be submitted after that time, so applicants also need to allow for their organisation’s internal research-office deadline.

This is a substantial training investment rather than a conventional pot of individual PhD studentships. It combines a doctoral programme with targeted training and capacity-building activities for mid-career and senior researchers. The programme should help people across career stages make better use of large and complex data while keeping the research question, conceptual understanding, ethics, and appropriate method at the centre.

Key details

The £5.85 million figure is ESRC’s maximum contribution, not an unrestricted award for any training design. For application planning, ESRC advises allocating around £3.1 million to the studentship element and around £2.75 million to activities for other career stages. At least £10,000 of the grant must be ringfenced to work with the ESRC Research Capability Hub so that online resources remain available after the funded period.

What the programme needs to achieve

ESRC wants the award to build a cadre of doctoral researchers with the knowledge and skills to use new data-driven approaches to produce insight for policy, practice, and society. It also wants the investment to pilot more flexible postgraduate pathways and make advanced training available to people who may not follow a traditional full-time doctorate. A proposal should therefore describe a coherent programme, not simply list topics or promise a larger intake.

The training must cover a broad range of social science methods. ESRC explicitly says that applications focused solely on qualitative or solely on quantitative approaches will not be assessed as a priority. The curriculum should connect conceptual knowledge with skills, including digital data collection from digital sources, ownership, curation, storage, and analysis. Research questions should drive the choice of data and methods. Relevant work may involve textual or visual methods, observational methods, digital technologies, machine learning, or artificial intelligence, but a fashionable tool is not a substitute for a sound research design.

The leadership team should bring together expertise across social science disciplines and, where needed, other research council domains. The official call encourages applicants not to restrict their programme to established interdisciplinary arrangements or to particular datasets. The case for the programme should instead explain the capability gap, the communities it will serve, and why the proposed combination of disciplines and partners is needed.

Doctoral training and cohort design

ESRC will fund eight studentships per year for three years. The proposed programme must support at least ten studentships per year for three consecutive cohorts, so the application must identify credible additional funding for at least two awards per cohort. The additional funding should be described and evidenced, but it should not be included in the ESRC budget requested from this opportunity.

Students are expected to start in October 2027, and the award must start by 1 October 2027. Each funded studentship is costed as four years inclusive of a three-month placement. The standard model provides three and a half years of funding and £1,000 for extra placement costs; students who do not take a placement receive funding for three and a quarter years. The actual support for an individual should reflect prior training identified through a development needs analysis.

The student experience should include a strong cohort identity, a high-quality research environment, supervisory capacity, and access to a diverse training community. All UKRI-funded training grants must offer both part-time and full-time study. Applicants should explain how flexible working patterns, wellbeing, supervision, and professional development will be supported, rather than treating these as administrative details.

Studentship allocation is devolved to the successful award. ESRC expects a fair and transparent open competition in which potential is the primary criterion, rather than internal quotas. The proposal should set out how recruitment, selection, development needs analysis, annual review, supervision, and allocation decisions will work across the participating organisations.

Research in Practice is a core part of the doctoral experience. Activities should help students apply research skills in different settings, collaborate across sectors and disciplines, communicate with impact, develop networks, understand entrepreneurship and leadership, and take responsibility for their own development and career direction. Collaborative studentships with non-academic organisations are encouraged, and ESRC has set a target that at least 15% of the studentships it funds should be collaborative with public, private, or civil-society organisations. Co-funding from a partner is encouraged but is not required for a collaborative studentship.

Training for mid-career and senior researchers

The “plus” element is central to the call. Around £2.75 million of the indicative budget should support training and capacity building beyond the doctoral cohort. ESRC describes several possible purposes: buying out researcher time to develop and apply new skills, supporting skill development in different disciplinary and sector settings, helping trainers and supervisors who work with data-driven research, and developing sustainable peer networks.

The wider offer should be designed around the needs and constraints of experienced researchers. A good application might combine short courses, advanced workshops, mentoring, devolved funding, communities of practice, or access to shared resources, but the form matters less than the rationale and delivery plan. Applicants should explain who will be served, which barriers to upskilling the programme addresses, how participants will be selected, and how learning will be connected to the doctoral curriculum without simply duplicating existing ESRC or UKRI provision.

ESRC expects the investment to share useful pedagogical and methodological practice with the wider social science community. The award should work with the ESRC Research Capability Hub to keep resources, networks, and communities of practice sustainable beyond the funding period. Sustainability therefore needs to appear in the design, budget, governance, and evaluation plan from the beginning.

Eligibility and partnership requirements

The lead must be a UK research organisation eligible for ESRC funding and must have the infrastructure needed to provide postgraduate training. An organisation can be project lead on only one application, but it can be a project co-lead or project partner on any number of applications. A single institution may apply, or organisations may form a consortium with one organisation identified as project lead.

The lead organisation does not have to have doctoral research degree-awarding powers. However, if it does not, the consortium must include an organisation that does, and formal arrangements must be in place from the start of the award if a non-awarding organisation will host studentships. Organisations hosting studentships act as the principal base for those students, while the lead organisation acts as the training grant holder.

Project partners do not need to be eligible for UKRI funding. They may include universities that are not leading or co-leading, businesses, public-sector organisations, third-sector organisations, voluntary, community and social-enterprise organisations, and other stakeholders. Every partner must make a meaningful contribution. The application should show added value through activities such as placements, specialist training, access to facilities, additional studentships, or links to an important user or stakeholder. It should also explain the two-way benefit and how the partners will work together during delivery.

The call expects a strong interdisciplinary leadership group, experienced doctoral-training delivery, capacity for inclusive and accessible training, effective partnership management, and the administrative resources to run a complex programme. For a single-institution award, ESRC specifies a senior director post of more than 20% full-time equivalent; for a consortium, the senior director post should be more than 30% full-time equivalent. A deputy director, training lead, experienced manager, administrator, management-board support, and partner-institution contacts are also expected at a minimum.

How to apply

Applications must be made through the new UKRI Funding Service. Je-S cannot be used. The lead research organisation is responsible for the submission, but all team members and partners should contribute. The practical sequence is:

1. Select Start application on the official opportunity page and confirm that you are the project lead.
2. Sign in or create a Funding Service account, select the organisation, verify the email address, and set a password.
3. Complete the online questions and upload any requested documents. Save work in the service or prepare responses offline for copying into the form.
4. Check the completed application in read-only view before sending it to the research office.
5. Send it to the research office for institutional, hosting, and finance checks.
6. Allow the research office to return edits if needed; it is the research office that submits the checked application to UKRI.

The application asks for a plain-English summary, a vision, an approach, a positive culture and environment plan, capability to deliver, partnerships and governance, justification of costs, project-partner information, and an equality, diversity and inclusion plan. The main vision response has a 1,000-word limit and the approach response has a 3,500-word limit. Applicants should read the full questions in the Funding Service, because the assessors will look for more than a general statement about the value of data skills: they want a delivery model, evidence of capability, partner commitments, student support, data-management practice, monitoring, and a credible route to impact.

The final application must be self-contained. Hyperlinks may point to reference information, but assessors are not required to follow links to understand the proposal. Images should be used sparingly; text paragraphs and tables placed inside images are not permitted. Organisations should register for the Funding Service early and confirm internal approval and finance deadlines well before the ESRC deadline.

Assessment and contacts

A commissioning panel will assess and rank applications, shortlist applicants, and interview those shortlisted. ESRC expects interviews in the week commencing 18 January 2027 and aims to communicate decisions in February 2027. The assessment areas are vision, approach, positive culture and environment, capability to deliver, governance, justification of costs, project partners, and equality, diversity and inclusion.

Questions about this opportunity should go to DataDrivenResearch@esrc.ukri.org. Questions about costings and proposal development should go to the applicant’s research office first. Technical questions about submitting through the Funding Service should go to support@funding-service.ukri.org. Applicants who are unsure whether a proposed programme falls within ESRC remit should use the remit query form linked from the official page.

This is an open call with a fixed deadline, so the page should be treated as an active application opportunity. The most important preparation is to assemble the interdisciplinary leadership team, secure the additional funding needed to reach ten studentships per year, document meaningful partner contributions, and show how the doctoral and wider-career training strands reinforce one another.

Official links

• UKRI opportunity page
• ESRC remit query form