We support postgraduate training to help ensure the flow of highly qualified people into research careers both within and beyond academia.

We support around 3000 PhD students each year with an approximate funding total of £40 million.

The PhD is the first step towards a career in research and provides training for a range of opportunities. ESRC students go on to work in academia, government research, business and a range of other careers.

Doctoral Training Centres

In 2010 we established a new national network of 21 institutional and consortia level Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs)  through which we now deliver all our studentship funding. Our DTCs cover the full disciplinary range of the social sciences as well as areas of interdisciplinary research.

Our DTCs were accredited as ESRC training providers following a competitive peer review process and have provided clear evidence of the highest quality in their training provision. The DTCs are accredited for a period of five years and the first cohort of students started in October 2011. The next opportunity for institutions to seek accreditation will be in 2015. The specification for the call will be informed by the independent network evaluation scheduled for 2014/15.

We will fund approximately 600 new studentships a year through our DTC Network. Our DTCs distribute the studentships, however, we have set disciplinary benchmarks to guide their distribution ensure that capacity is built across the social sciences. In addition we have applied a more prescriptive steer in our priority areas to ensure that capacity is built and the benchmark set reached.

• The development of the DTC network – further information on the objectives and commissioning of the network
• Distribution of 2011/12 studentships
• Monitoring and evaluation of the DTC network
• ESRC guidance on using the Je-S Student Data Portal (SDP) (PDF, 164Kb)
  

ESRC Advanced Training Network

One of the key aims of the new postgraduate training framework was to ensure that excellent advanced training was opened up and made accessible to students both across accredited Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs) and outside the network. That aim has been realised through the creation of an Advanced Training Network incorporating training from the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), Researcher Development Initiative (RDI) and DTCs. Over 400 training courses have been made available by these training investments to all social science students registered for a PhD. For more information see:

• Resources for all postgraduate students
  

It is intended that this will be an evolving network, with courses being added and developed over the five year DTC accreditation period. We will also be consulting with the academic community in order to analyse the training on offer, identify gaps, and consider the most appropriate way to address those gaps. It is expected that this will lead to a commissioning process in 2012.

Key statistics 

• We will publish information on the distribution of studentships in early 2012.
• ESRC PhD submission rate survey
• Internships (this information will be published shortly).

International PhD Partnering Initiative

We are in the process of developing an International PhD Partnering Scheme to link DTCs and emerging centres of social science excellence overseas such as India, Brazil, China and South Africa. We will support our DTCs to partner up doctoral researchers with overseas researchers working on similar topics. The details of this scheme will be announced shortly.