UKRI’s New Deal for Postgraduate Research (“the New Deal”) is a long-term piece of work that aims to improve the experience and quality of postgraduate research training in the UK. The government’s Research & Development (R&D) Roadmap first committed to the creation of the New Deal. In July 2021 the government published its R&D People and Culture Strategy, which aims to ensure that the UK has an outstanding research culture that truly supports discovery, diversity and innovation and that values everyone’s contributions. It seeks to enable varied and diverse careers that bring excitement and recognition, allowing talent and ideas to flow freely between academia, business and other sectors.

AIRTO’s members have a range of important connections with universities in the area of postgraduate research. These include supporting projects, collaborating with individual students and departments, and operating postgraduate institutes where the students place of research may be within a member’s laboratories. Members also have large numbers of staff with doctorates awarded in the UK and overseas, and recruit a significant number of such staff every year. AIRTO has responded to UKRI’s recent engagement exercise which focusses primarily on doctoral training from the viewpoint of the current and future Innovation, Research & Technology sector’s involvement in postgraduate research. Read the full response here…

About AIRTO
AIRTO is the Association of Innovation, Research and Technology Organisations. Its membership comprises approximately sixty of the principal organisations operating in the UK’s Innovation, Research and Technology (IRT) sector. The IRT sector has a combined turnover of £6.9Bn, employing over 57,000 scientific and technical staff (equivalent to the academic staffing of the Russell Group of universities) and, for comparison, it is significantly larger than the network of Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany both in size and its scope of activities. The sector contributes £34Bn to UK GDP. AIRTO’s members work at the interface between academia and industry, for both private and public sector clients.

Members include independent Research and Technology Organisations, Catapult Centres, Public Sector Research Establishments, National Laboratories, and some privately held innovation companies.

For further information, please contact: enquiries@airto.co.uk