Staff or students? PhD students face worst of both worlds in lockdown

Announcing the latest campus closures, universities minister Michelle Donelan insisted that research students “should be treated on the same basis as employees”, and continue to work on site, even if it was too dangerous for undergraduates.

Rewind nine months, however, and the opposite was apparently true; postgraduate research (PGR) students, locked out of labs and libraries, were ineligible for the furlough payment that their postdoctoral co-workers received because they were not staff.

Doctoral students can be staff one day, students the next, but this never seems to work in their favour.

The alternative to furlough for PGR students who cannot work is “intermitting” – pausing both your studies and your stipend until you can resume. That unappealing prospect is not viable for the vast majority, leading many students to soldier on from home. Unsurprisingly, few have the means to survive months without any pay – precisely the reason that the furlough scheme was introduced.

As a PhD student, I’ve heard a lot from my peers on how their research has been disrupted and delayed by restricted access to physical facilities and in-person resources, or by changes to their home life because of sickness or school closures. Some of these delays may be solved with a few weeks of extra time, some may require months or even a full year, but almost all will need some form of extension to their submission date – which means an extension to their funding.

The largest funder of PGR education, UK Research and Innovation, has said that its final year students are eligible for funded extensions of up to six months. The Wellcome Trust has followed suit. Second- or third-year students are less fortunate: UKRI has stated that 77 per cent of non-final-year students requested extensions of about five months, which would cost roughly £81 million, but it allocated only £19 million from its £6 billion budget.

Because individual universities are responsible for distributing this money, it also means that a student at one university may get lucky while another may not, even if their circumstances are identical. No extra funding was set aside for disproportionately affected student groups, despite the UKRI’s own research determining that they would be in need of assistance. Instead, supervisors were encouraged to act “generously and sympathetically” towards these students and foot the bill themselves.

Still, UKRI-funded students are the luckiest of the bunch. Without any defined set of guidelines – as with something such as furlough – each university can choose who to give extensions to, and for how long. This means that across the country, university-funded students are having vastly different experiences. While some universities are matching UKRI’s offer and funding extensions of up to six months, others are offering extensions that were insufficient by the end of the first lockdown and laughable by the third. Some are offering no extension at all.

To students who face insufficient funding to complete their research, funders suggest students simply reworking their projects to avoid running out of money. For all but the luckiest of students, “reworking” is likely to be impossible, and will simply mean substantially cutting down the project or accepting a period of unpaid work at the end. Specific circumstances, such as those faced by international students with visa requirements, or self-funded students, may be even more dire.

It is almost impossible to know what the net impact of Covid-19 on PGR students will be. Missed internships, international collaborations or presenting and networking at a conference in-person are, however, a certainty. With the reduced research time and associated stress, students risk submitting lower-quality theses and publishing less or not at all. In an increasingly competitive academic job market, where research councils and charities are already cutting their funding for fellowships and other early career researcher roles, these factors could destroy a student’s chances of an academic career.

Support for PGR students is just as vital as support for undergraduate students and staff members, and an inadequate response from funders and the government has the potential to be financially and professionally devastating.

It seems clear from the number of open letters and petitions that have circulated that students simply want a response from their funder that is consistent, comprehensive and compassionate. In an ideal world, any institution that hosts or funds a PGR student would step up and fund extensions that are fit for purpose. If they cannot afford to do that, they need to lobby the government, as others have suggested with regard to undergraduate students, for a bailout that would allow them to provide this short-term financial support.

A more structural change may also be required. The University and College Union has just begun a campaign to have PGR students recognised as staff, as they are in Sweden; the pandemic illustrates why PGRs cannot continue to be the anomaly.

As the Covid-19 pandemic drags into its second year, support for disrupted PGRs needs to ramp up, not wind down. Funded extensions wouldn’t just be beneficial for individual students. PGRs generate data for publication and for grant applications, mentor and teach undergraduates both in lecture theatres (or over Zoom) or in their research projects. Supporting these students to complete their training will not just benefit them; it will help achieve the government’s own goals for research and ensure the UK remains home to many of the world’s best universities.

Rebecca Teague is a PhD student at the University of Sussex’s Genome Damage and Stability Centre.