The standard amount for UKRI funded studentships will see a £615 rise, from £18,622 to £19,237 – an increase of 3.3 per cent.

That is not, you might note, an increase of 6.3 per cent. Until Covid, the practice was to increase the level by the recorded CPI-H rate of the previous September.

But after an almighty hoo-ha over the inherent lag in that approach when inflation started to soar, it put in a big increase – and has now abandoned having any kind of anchoring justification whatsoever – unless you count last year, when we apparently caught UKRI explicitly trading off the number of funded studentships against the amount it expected those students to live on.

Here’s how the differences have been playing out for PhD students:

That 13 per cent increase in 2022 must have felt generous, hence what looks like an attempt to claw back. But when set against percentage increases in the National Minimum (“Living”) Wage, even that 2022 boost doesn’t look generous.

As ever, important to note that plenty of PhDs aren’t funded by UKRI. But on the basis that when Bagpuss wakes up all his friends wake up too, the rate is important – it’s seen as the defacto standard.

As I say, there is a trade off – between fewer well funded stipends or more less well funded ones.  But that’s exactly why it’s important to have a justificatory anchor – because somewhere in between well funded and not well funded is adequately funded, and we still don’t have a definition from the body that has responsibility for research talent.

The question remains – what anchor to pick. Under UKRI’s “New Deal” plans, we are still due to get a proper review of the basis on which stipend levels are set, including both the basic amount and consideration of childcare costs, pensions and Advance HE recommendations on grants for underrepresented and disadvantaged groups.

No word on that process either, or from UCU, which is still purporting to be representing PGR students’ interests over issues of pay, despite cutting the staff working on the issue.

---

Since publication UKRI has come back to us to say that the AY2024-25 rate is based on the OBR forecast for CPI for Q3 2024 (as forecast in November 2023 – 3.3%) – which is sort of good news given that on budget day, the OBR revised down that projection to 1.6%. It says that this is “the same way” that the AY2023-24 rate was based on the OBR forecast for CPI to Q3 2023 – but that used the March OBR projection rather than the November one, which would have seen the increase pegged at 6.9% last year. What it doesn’t say is why it’s switched to a projection – last year’s OBR projection turned out to be an undershoot, something we see in UG student finance projections. Nor does it say why it’s now using CPI rather than CPIH (which includes owner occupiers’ housing costs) – CPIH has been consistently higher for a while…