UKRI student communications

Overview

UKRI's support for research students is changing. We welcome views on what messages we should be conveying to UKRI funded students about the support available to them.

Why your views matter

UKRI is the largest single funder of postgraduate research students - mostly PhD students - in the UK.

Our New Deal for Postgraduate Research is a long-term programme of reform, which started with a call for input held in 2022. In response to over 400 responses from students, research organisations and others, we have:

• published a new Statement of Expectations
• published a policy statement setting out changes to our training grant conditions, which come into effect on 1 October. 
• Updated our Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA) Framework

We have also made a number of other reforms, such as increasing the minimum stipend.

In our policy statement we said:

“We will communicate more directly with students, supervisors, disability offices and others about what support we offer to UKRI students, from the start of the 2025-26 academic year. The aim of this exercise will be to increase awareness of the support on offer, not to replace ROs’ or providers’ own communications. Our communications will specifically direct students to seek further information from their ROs or providers.”

In June 2025 we surveyed students on their current level of awareness of support and their communication preferences. This highlighted that we can improve how we communicate with students and we refer to insights from that research throughout this exercise. We also have previously published other research that demonstrated students and staff felt there was a need for UKRI to provide better information to students.

In this exercise we are asking for views on a series of topic guides that we will use to inform our communications with students. We welcome comments from people working in research organisations about whether the messages will support your own communications.