How is arts and humanities research funded?
In universities there are essentially three ways by which #arts and #humanities #research is funded.
1. Competition
Various funders give grants on the basis of competition, assessed by peer experts. Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is one. We are the largest public funder in the UK, but as part of UK Research and Innovation we are the smallest research council in grant terms.
The other highly significant funder is Horizon Europe, which through the European Research Commission funds knowledge development across all science - in the widest sense of that word. The British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Wellcome Trust and others are also wholly or partly engaged in funding arts and humanities research. And arts and humanities researchers are successful in gaining funding from other research councils too - it's one of th reasons why a unified funding body is so important and valuable.
This mosaic of funders supports specific projects, some of which are in open calls where the subject is not predetermined (sometimes called response mode), and some are invited through strategic calls where the funder sets the broad theme for investigation. So in the case of AHRC, we have schemes called Catalyst and Curiosity which are open to any idea (and as we can fund fewer than 10% of applications, even where many more are truly worth supporting, so excellence is absolutely essential), and we have strategic projects which involve competition, for example in design to mitigate climate change, or responsible uses of AI, or tackling modern slavery.
AHRC is the largest strategic funder of arts and humanities research, with the other funders mostly but not exclusively operating in response mode. All our judgements are made through independent peer review, recognised globally as the gold standard for assessment of research applications.
2. Formula funding
UKRI also gives all universities funding called QR, which is a block grant per university determined by the size of departments, a calculation of the cost of research, and by the results of the Research Excellence Framework, a recurrent exercise whereby external expert reviewers scrutinise a sample of research submitted by each university and assign a quality grading. REF 2021 showed the strength of arts and humanities across the country, a strength which is also visible in league tables globally.
This funding supports many things, which include the establishment of institutes and centres, granting of otherwise unfunded sabbaticals, or of conferences and workshops. The use made of QR funding is assessed by the REF, since all research in any subject benefits from this QR. We call this structure dual support, QR plus grants.
The quantity of QR for universities which is generated by arts and humanities in any year is about three times the AHRC’s annual delegated grant budget.
What this means is that the predominant weight of funding for arts and humanities in the UK is driven by the ideas, ambitions and quality assessments of researchers.
This strongly reinforces importance of the AHRC’s strategic choices, for instance around the creative industries, design, health, AI and community.
3. Universities themselves
Many universities have for years used their own resources to fund research. So recent calculations suggest that universities probably contribute around £5bn a year to the production of research across the UK, and that will include some support for arts and humanities.
Moreover, it is well known that much of this has, for a generation, come from surpluses arising from student fees, and these have been predominantly from arts, humanities and social sciences. This was characterised as a subsidy from teaching to research – and indeed the closing of the gap between the income generated from arts, humanities and social sciences students and the costs of their education is a core reason for the current pressures on universities.
However, it is also the case that universities which believe strongly in research-led teaching, that is that university education should be based as far as possible on the very cutting edge of contemporary knowledge, are also investing in this fundamental connection. We have a system in the UK where much research and teaching happens in the same kind of organization, the university. It has served us well as a system.
So this combination of funding adds up, and of course UKRI itself is just part of the broader funding of science and innovation by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (we receive less than half of the total of about £20bn a year, which includes our subscription to Horizon Europe which we usually then recoup through our grant success), supplemented by quite significant research budgets of other government departments, including the MoD, DEFRA, FCDO and so on.
But the overall picture is that the AHRC (and arts and humanities research generally) receives a fraction of the more than £20bn of the public research and development funds we spend on science. Much of that science requires very expensive equipment, and arts and humanities researchers get to use that equipment sometimes themselves. It's particularly true that Creative Industries is supported by multiple parts of the system. But 2% of UKRI's budget would be a reasonable calculation for the total amount of all the investment described above, and as we have shown, that is only a part of the total investment in R&D.
That’s quite striking because at the last REF, about 22% of the staff submitted were in arts and humanities. That’s research active staff – and there wasn’t much of a tail of underperformance. Arts and humanities researchers were judged to be more or less as excellent and as impactful as any other sector (and AHRC made a significant contribution to that excellence); and as the smallest council in UKRI we fund the second largest group of research active funders after the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) which has a marginally larger share.
So the bang for our buck is actually pretty impressive.
Still 2% of UKRI's budget is still 2% - what does that mean to the citizens of the UK?
The UK has calculated that it now spends about 3% of GDP on all research and development every year. GDP is over £1trillion. Of that about 40% is total tax revenue, of which only a part is income tax. So by my very rough back of the envelope calculation, the total annual cost of AHRC to the ordinary taxpayer is a tiny fraction of a penny a year.
Public finances don’t really work like this of course, but it’s terribly easy to imagine that a grant of £1million (which is usually spread over several years) is a vast chunk of the public finances. It clearly isn’t.
What I am not saying is that we shouldn’t care about a million pounds here or there – we absolutely do and we should. Managing public money is a duty and a responsibility on which society is based. And there are choices which we must make. The point of course is that when all the taxpayers get their fractional pennies together you end up with a sum of money which can do a lot, and that’s when it becomes important to be able to justify any spend. But the wider context is important and has perhaps been missing of late. We at AHRC have to deliver on our legal commitments to support the UK’s society and economy, and to do so from within UKRI, and I believe we pass that test - and here are three reasons why:
Arts and humanities research helps to grow our creative industries, one of our major economic growth areas, and sustain our global leadership.
It can support our communities and ourselves to come together, to build a healthier planet, to use the past to live in our present and imagine our future.
It is core to the science that helps us understand ourselves, and our place in the world.
Find out more here
