Grants awarded by lottery popular with minority, junior scholars

Many more scholars from ethnic minority backgrounds are applying for – and winning – research grants from the British Academy since it began using a partial lottery to award funding, the organisation’s chief executive has revealed.

Nearly two-and-a-half years after the UK funder announced it would run its Small Grants Scheme, which offers £10,000 for innovative projects in the humanities and social sciences, using “partial randomisation”, interim results disclosed to Times Higher Education suggest the experiment has led to a significant shift in both applications and award winners.

With four rounds of the three-year trial completed, the proportion of applications from non-white applicants has increased 25 per cent to 35 per cent following the introduction of randomisation. The proportion of non-white winners has also risen from 19 per cent to 34 per cent.

Speaking to THE, the academy’s chief executive, Hetan Shah, said the early results from the lottery system – in which applications are screened by experts to ensure that they pass a high-quality threshold but are then funded at random – had provided some unexpected benefits.

“One of the most important things which I had not anticipated was that it is not just the randomisation changing who is given the grant, but the signalling effect of doing something radical like this has changed the applicant pool,” said Shah.

“In other words, people who historically may not have applied to the academy – and thus ruled themselves out – have now started applying.”

The lottery scheme had also seen a wider range of projects funded, with more ideas that “go against the stream” more likely to win support, continued Shah.

Anecdotal evidence also suggested early career academics preferred the lottery system to the old system, in which proposals were ranked on excellence, because those who met the quality threshold – about 50 per cent did so – but missed out on a grant felt more comfortable reporting back to their departments, he added.

“They could go back to their universities and say, ‘I passed the quality test but missed out in the lottery’,” explained Shah on how the lottery system helped to reframe what might otherwise be seen as a failure.

Earlier data on the first two rounds of the experiment, reported in September 2023, has also found funding was going to a “diverse spectrum” of institutions, following the change. Success rates from Scotland and Northern Ireland had increased sharply, with overall applications to the first two rounds increased by 32 per cent compared with the previous year.

The fifth round of the trial is currently in progress, with the academy planning to share a full analysis of the effectiveness of the model and its impact on grant outcomes following the completion of the sixth and final round.

The academy was only the second UK research funder to experiment with this type of allocation, following a smaller trial by the Natural Environment Research Council. Similar systems have also been used in Switzerland, Germany and New Zealand in an effort to lower the burden of peer review and eliminate bias against minority academics and those from less prestigious universities.

“Not many funders tested this kind of funding model but hopefully it will start to get supported,” concluded Shah on the results which he said may provide just a “snapshot” but “do seem indicative”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com