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Pragmatic problem-solving for inclusive doctoral admission

by Bing Lu, Rebekah Smith McGloin and Scott Foster

This blog post reflects on ongoing collaborative efforts to advance more equitable doctoral admissions between a group of UK institutions. It argues that transforming graduate admissions is not simply driven by competitive logic, nor by a search for a single, universal framework that can be applied across the sector. Instead, sector-level change emerges through collective, interactional, and often emotional work.

Inclusive postgraduate research (PGR) admission and recruitment have become an increasing global concern (Posselt, 2016; Bastedo, 2026; Boghdady, 2025). Drawing on ongoing collaborative work between a group of UK institutions, this blog post reflects on collective efforts to advance more equitable doctoral admissions. We argue that inclusive doctoral admission is not a competition to produce an exhaustive, finished framework, but an ongoing process of collective problem solving, one that requires humility, openness, and sustained commitment across institutional boundaries.

PGR students are strategically vital to the UK’s research capacity, innovation and future academic workforce. PhD programmes increasingly function as the primary entry route into academic careers and shape who is able to imagine themselves, and be recognised, as future researchers. Within the doctoral lifecycle, admission is a particularly critical intervention point. Yet, compared with undergraduate or taught postgraduate recruitment, the mechanisms shaping PGR admissions have historically received less sustained scrutiny.

A report commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) in 2014 highlighted that UK institutions primarily value academic attainment, the quality of research proposals, and evidence of prior research skills when selecting candidates (Mellors-Bourne et al, 2014). Since 2020, a growing body of UK-based scholarship has begun to highlight equity issues in doctoral selection (McGloin & Wynne, 2022; Oyinloye & Wakeling 2023; Mateos‑González & Wakeling, 2022; Britton et al, 2020), and has sought to explore the ascriptive nature of systems and processes that underpin doctoral recruitment and admission.  Together, these studies identify a range of barriers. These include the persistence of ‘elite pipelines’, whereby attending a Russell Group university at undergraduate level strongly predicts access to elite postgraduate education, as well as the significant under-representation of British candidates from minoritised backgrounds at doctoral level, particularly within funded studentships. These patterns underscore the need to interrogate how merit, potential, and excellence are operationalised in practice.

The initiatives and the community of practice

Initiatives funded by Research England and Office for Students, including the Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation (EDEPI) programme, represent important attempts to push forward the agenda of inclusive PGR admissions in English Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). In 2022, EDEPI conducted a national survey on PGR admissions practices in UK HEIs. The study identified ten key barriers to inclusive admission in its final report EDEPI Postgraduate Researcher Admission Framework and led to the development of the Postgraduate Researcher Competency-Based Admission Framework. This framework deliberately shifts focus away from previous institutional prestige and historical academic attainment towards the specific skills, experiences and competencies which demonstrate future potential for doctoral research.

From 2024, EDEPI has fostered an inter-institutional Community of Practice involving a group of international and UK institutions to explore approaches for enhancing inclusive PGR admissions collectively. Within this community, three institutions engaged as case studies to trial new approaches to evaluating applicants beyond conventional academic metrics, building on the Competency Framework. Through regular facilitated discussions, shared reflective practices, collaborative webinars and a jointly organised symposium on Fostering inclusive doctoral admission, participating institutions work alongside the EDEPI team to explore challenges and embed equity-driven principles into their PGR admissions processes.

Key learning from collective work

One of the most important lessons drawn from this collective institutional effort is that, while institutions hold different conceptions of fairness and merit shaped by their unique contexts, they nonetheless share a commitment to addressing persistent equity issues. This aligns with the findings of the sector survey (Smith McGloin et al, 2024) which found an overwhelming commitment to inclusive practice, an awareness of the need for change and huge complexity in existing processes with multiple stakeholders and drivers. This work is neither straightforward nor purely normative; it is complex, negotiated, and deeply pragmatic.

For example, in staff training workshops, academic colleagues described their deliberate efforts to apply equity principles when making departmental admissions decisions. Professional services staff, meanwhile, highlighted their role in carefully matching applicants’ proposals and disciplinary backgrounds to appropriate departments, ensuring that applications reach the review stage rather than being filtered out prematurely. Where resistance or hesitation arose around the introduction of yet another ‘framework’, this was less about rejecting equity goals and more about uncertainty regarding feasible, appropriate, and sustainable implementation.

Debates around distributive fairness versus procedural fairness illustrate this tension clearly (Boliver et al, 2022). Graduate admissions are not objective measurements of worth but sites of intense organisational boundary work, where judgements about potential, fit, and excellence are continuously negotiated. These discussions echo longstanding sociological insights into academic evaluation. Lamont (2009), for instance, argues that in real-world academic review, excellence and diversity are not alternative principles but additive ones. Staff involved in PGR admissions are often guided by pragmatic, problem-solving considerations, caught between institutional principles, personal commitments, and procedural constraints. Panels are typically required to reach consensus on a limited number of candidates within tight timeframes, and these practical pressures shape how fairness is understood and enacted.

Within this ‘black box’ of academic decision-making, Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus is frequently cited to explain how scholars’ legitimate visions of high-quality research and defend disciplinary boundaries, with conflicts often most pronounced among those occupying similar positions. Our collective work over the past 12 months, however, suggests a more nuanced picture. Admissions staff, both academic and professional, are motivated not only by positional interests but also by a shared, pragmatic curiosity about how to solve persistent problems together. The Community of Practice created space for dialogue, uncertainty, and learning, enabling participants to reflect on their own assumptions while engaging with others’ institutional constraints.  Transforming graduate admissions, then, is not simply driven by competitive logic, nor by a search for a single, universal framework that can be applied across the sector. Instead, sector-level change emerges through collective, interactional, and often emotional work. A recent WonkHE article, How to level the PhD playing field, posed a critical question: does the sector have the collective will to move beyond well-intentioned initiatives towards the structural changes required to address inequities among PGRs?

The experiences emerging from EDEPI offer cautious but promising evidence. They demonstrate how institutions with differing histories, resources, and institutional affordances can nonetheless work together pragmatically to enhance admissions practices. Inclusive doctoral admission, in this sense, is not a finished model to be adopted but an ongoing process of collective problem solving, one that requires humility, openness, and sustained commitment across institutional boundaries. Through the established Community of Practice, the EDEPI framework has also begun to attract interest from institutions in international contexts, despite differing governance structures, as a means of collectively developing equity-oriented approaches to PGR admissions through shared learning.

Closing summary

Inclusive PGR admissions require ongoing, collaborative work, as shown through EDEPI’s efforts to help institutions rethink how fairness, potential, and merit are assessed. Colleagues across academic and professional roles demonstrate that excellence and diversity can be mutually reinforcing when supported by reflective practice and shared experimentation. Future progress depends on refining competency-based approaches, tracking applicant journeys, expanding training and co-creation, and translating these insights into clearer sector guidance and policy.

Dr Bing Lu is a higher education scholar based at Nottingham Trent University and University of Warwick. Bing’s research critically engages with access, equity, and sustainability in postgraduate education, focusing particularly on underrepresented groups and the global flows of academic labour. Bing is currently guest editing a Special Issue on Taboos in Doctoral Education Across Cultures hosted by Higher Education Quarterly.

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin is Director of Research Culture and Environment at Nottingham Trent University and Chair of the UK Council for Graduate Education. Her focus is on innovations in practice and national policy work related to new and emerging forms of doctorate that align with the changing research, innovation and skills policy landscape; including research culture reform, civic-engaged and inclusive doctoral education and equity-focused admissions.

Scott Foster is a professor specialising in postgraduate research culture and academic leadership. He has published extensively on equity, well-being, and innovation in doctoral education. Through influential articles and forthcoming book projects, he advances global research culture while supporting institutions to strengthen policy, supervision, and the doctoral experience.


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Inclusive research agendas: what’s excluded?

by Jess Pilgrim-Brown

University discourse, policy, and practice has focused increasingly on access, widening participation and inclusion over the course of the last thirty years (Heath et al, 2013). In particular, understanding access, participation and inclusion for those who align with the different protected characteristics (as defined by the Equality Act 2010) has been of interest to academic research, given various political movements to widen access to higher education. There is a wealth of research in the space of equity, equality, and inclusion which has started to prise open the daily lived experiences of those who hold one or more of the protected characteristics as being part of their identity. Both in the tradition of UK academia, but also from research conducted in the US, we – as a research community – have begun to recognise the institutional and systemic structures which lead to sexism, microaggressions, blatant overt racism, disabilities and health inequalities, issues of access, pastoral burden and caring responsibilities. These facets can lead to extreme workloads, extreme discomfort, bullying and sometimes harassment routinely endured by members of both the academic community and the student body. Of course, research which seeks to make inequalities more transparent has also focused on social class background, which does not feature as one of the nine characteristics outlined by the Equality Act 2010. Here, research has predominantly focused on the experiences of working-class students, academics (and on one occasion, parents) but as yet, in the UK, the remit of who is included here is limited (Crew, 2020; 2021a; 2021b).

There are groups which exist outside the current research narrative which are less considered within the wider body of experiential evidence within the academy (Moreau & Wheeler, 2023; Caldwell, 2022). The ambition to promote access to these voices formed the basis of the rationale for my doctoral thesis research ‘Doing the heavy lifting: the experiences of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities’, completed in 2023. The study featured 13 participants who self-identified as working-class and worked in professional services and administrative roles in UK Russell Group universities. Using a novel approach it combined narrative inquiry (to understand historical personal biography and context) with more traditional semi-structured interviews, to understand the phenomena of existing in contemporary university spaces (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000).

As I discussed both in a presentation at SRHE’s annual conference and within my doctoral thesis research, there are distinct limitations within the academic research body which have isolated the experiences of students and academics with particular protected characteristics, often at the expense of intersectionality or of the representation of other stakeholders who have critical value within university spaces. I addressed the ways in which administrative staff and professional services staff are included within academic research, as a representation of their human capital, roles and responsibilities, the ‘minions of management’ that Dopson & McNay discuss leads to an absence of voice and authority. These accounts focus on the actions performed within the university space rather than the experience these individuals have of that space, and how these experiences reflect the wider institutional culture at play (Caldwell, 2022). This understanding of other people within higher education research as being inextricably connected with role rather than identity and experience is something which was also exemplified by Marie-Pierre Moreau and Lucie Wheeler (2023) in their recent SRHE conference presentation on the current status of academic research literature with ancillary workers in higher education in the UK. Finding little UK-based research, Moreau & Wheeler concluded that the everyday experiences of ancillary workers had thus far, to their knowledge, failed to have been included in the wider narrative about institutional culture and lived experience in UK HEIs. 

In a previous blog post for SRHE, Michael Shattock discussed the centralisation of UK higher education away from regional responsibility and governance. Similarly, the degree to which the internal systems of university administration is centralised, or not, has the potential to facilitate or negate healthy working relationships and partnerships, fostered by governance structures. It is particularly pertinent that the brokers of the relationships which are formed from levels of centralisation are the professional services and administrative staff who facilitate the function and process of legislation, administration and research management and the teaching, research, and technical expertise of those working on academic contractual pathways. And yet, like the ancillary workers who provide critical support to the daily function of the university in the most literal form, the experiential perspectives of these huge groups of university employees are left largely outside of the scope of academic research.

Organisational culture literature dictates that culture is predominantly dictated by three elements: assumptions, values and artefacts (Schein, 2004). Where assumptions are a mental model used by managers to make sense of the environment, values are the socially constructed principles that guide behaviour; these are reflected through speech, approaches and spoken goals. Artefacts are the ‘visible and tangible layer’, in the case of the university, the statues and buildings (Harris, 1998; Joseph & Kibera, 2019). In understanding the possibilities for development and promotion, career trajectories, workload, working environments and relationships between people in higher education it might be possible to make some small-scale assumptions about how much these institutions are indeed changing towards becoming more inclusive or how far removing cultural icons of oppressions, such as statues, is a purely performative act.

By collecting first-hand experiential evidence around the assumptions and values of an institution, the nature of organisational culture might be possible to discern (Harris, 1998). I fail fundamentally to understand how research culture initiatives, which, in their broadest sense tackle the measurement and progression of positive research cultures in universities in the UK, can make any progress on the status and environment of our institutions without having legitimate, robust, empirical evidence driving policy and practice. And that empirical evidence needs to include the perspectives, insights, and opinions of everyone who is a direct stakeholder within the organisation. By omitting large swathes of those who directly affect and are directly affected by that organisation we omit the opportunity to make credible, inclusive, necessary progress both in policy, but also in the implementation of practice. The absence of these voices is an academic failure which, in its current form, fails to address the full spectrum of the political economy of UK universities. It is only in doing more work in this area that progress in equalities agendas can fully be realised.

Dr Jess Pilgrim-Brown is a sociologist and researcher in education. She focuses on issues relating to social class, gender and wider social inequalities. Her thesis research ‘Doing the heavy lifting, the experiences of working-class professional services and administrative staff in Russell Group universities’ was the first of its kind in the UK. Her research interests span sociological theory, innovative methods in qualitative research designs and research ethics. She is a current Research Associate at the University of Bristol and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford.


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Redefining cultures of excellence: A new event exploring models for change in recruiting researchers and setting research agendas

by Rebekah Smith McGloin and Rachel Handforth, Nottingham Trent University

Research excellence’ is a ubiquitous concept to which we are mostly habituated in the UK research ecosystem.  Yet, at the end of an academic year which saw the publication of UKRI EDI Strategy, four UKRI council reviews of their investments in PGR, House of Commons inquiry on Reproducibility and Research Integrity and following on from the development of manifesto, concordat, declaration and standards to support Open Research in recent years, it feels timely to engage in some critical reflection on cultures of excellence in research. 

The notion of ‘excellence’ has become an increasingly important part of the research ecosystem over the last 20 years (OECD, 2014). The drivers for this are traced to the need to justify the investment of public money in research and the increasing competition for scarce resources (Münch, 2015).  University rankings have further hardwired and amplified judgments about degrees of excellence into our collective consciousness (Hazelkorn, 2015).

Jong, Franssen and Pinfield (2021) highlight that the idea of excellence is a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer, 1989) however. That is, it is a nebulous construct which is poorly defined and is used in many different ways. It has nevertheless shaped policy, funding and assessment activities since the turn of the century. Ideas of excellence have been enacted through the Research Excellence Framework and associated allocation to universities of funding to support research, competitive schemes for grant funding, recruitment to flagship doctoral training partnerships and individual promotion and reward.

We can trace a number of recent initiatives at sector level, inter alia, that have sought to broaden ideas of research excellence and to challenge systemic and structural inequalities in our research ecosystem. These include the increase of impact weighting in REF2021 to 25%, trials of systems of partial randomisation as part of the selection process for some smaller research grants, e.g. British Academy from 2022, the Concordats and Agreements Review work in 2023 to align and increase influence, capacity, and efficiency of activity to support research culture and the recent Research England investment in projects designed to address the broken pipeline into research by increasing participation of people from racialised groups in doctoral education.

At the end of June, we are hosting an event at NTU which will focus on redefining cultures of research excellence through the lens of inclusion. The symposium, to be held at our Clifton Campus on Wednesday 28 June, provides an opportunity to re-examine the broad notion of research excellence, in the context of systemic inequalities that have historically locked out certain types of researchers and research agendas and locked in others.

The event focuses on two mutually-reinforcing areas: the possibility of creating more responsive and inclusive research agendas through co-creation between academics and communities; and broadening pathways into research through the inclusive recruitment of PhD and early career researchers. We take the starting position that approaches which focus on advancing equity are critical to achieving excellence in UK research and innovation.

The day will include keynotes from Dr Bernadine Idowu and Professor Kalwant Bhopal, the launch of a new competency-based PGR recruitment framework, based on sector consultation, and a programme of speakers talking about their approaches to diversifying researcher recruitment and engaging the community in setting research agendas. 

NTU will be showcasing two new projects that are designed to challenge old ideas of research excellence and forge new ways of thinking. EDEPI (Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation Programme) is a partnership with Liverpool John Moores and Sheffield Hallam Universities and NHS Trusts in the three cities. The project will explore how working with the NHS can improve access and participation in doctoral education for racially-minoritised groups. Co(l)laboratory is a project with University of Nottingham, based on the Universities for Nottingham civic agreement with local public-sector organisations. Collab will present early lessons from a community-informed approach to cohort-based doctoral training.

Our event is a great opportunity for universities and other organisations who are, in their own ways, redefining cultures of research excellence to share their approaches, challenges and successes. We invite individuals, project teams and organisations working in these areas to join us at the end of June, with the hope of building a community of practice around building inclusive research cultures, within and across the sector.

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin is Director of the Doctoral School at Nottingham Trent University and is Principal Investigator on the EDEPI and Co(l)laboratory projects. 

Dr Rachel Handforth is Senior Lecturer in Doctoral Education and Civic Engagement at NTU.