SeNSS Director's bulletin and ESRC COVID-19 guidance
Dear SeNSS community,
Let me begin by sending you all best wishes from all of us in the SeNSS core team at this very challenging time.
Yesterday Felicity and I attended a very useful virtual meeting of DTP Directors led by Frances Burstow, Deputy Director for Skills and Strategy at the ESRC. The attached slides summarise the ESRC’s current position on the likely impact of COVID-19 on doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows.
The SeNSS core team are taking a number of steps to ensure that all our researchers, supervisors and partners are supported to the best of our ability.
Proceeding with all our current competitions via virtual means. Pathway groups are currently grading this year’s shortlisted applications in the student-led completion and will submit their grades to us by 30 March. Pathway selection meetings will take place virtually during the first week of April. The Management Board will meet virtually on 30 April to make the final allocation of this year’s awards. Our PDF competition closes on 23 March but applicants logged within FluidReview by that date may now have until 9 April to submit supporting documents.
Supporting our existing doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. On 25 March, we will share a short Qualtrics survey designed to gauge the specific risks posed to the health, wellbeing and workplans of our researchers, and to identify steps that might be taken to mitigate these in the short and longer term. On the same day, Felicity and I will host two Zoom meetings at 11am (https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/652722603) and 7pm (https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/262682177) for doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows to address concerns and questions.
Sickness and extensions. Our usual sickness policy still applies. In short, sick leave is available to you if you become sick. Those who have already used their 13 weeks’ sick pay for this academic year for other reasons, are still eligible for further support due to COVID-19. If you become ill, please let your home institution know, and they will let us know. In this regard, UKRI is working to Government guidance regarding medical certification: currently, this means that you do not need to provide a sick note for the first seven days that you are ill, and we will follow the advice about being flexible about the evidence we would require if you are ill for more than seven days.
We are aware, of course, that some of our researchers may need to apply for extensions. The ESRC understands this but are very unlikely to be able to make additional funds available to SeNSS or any other DTP to cover the cost of funded extensions. As the attached slides indicate, the ESRC expects SeNSS to cover the cost from our current resources, noting that this may mean we have to reduce the number of studentships we offer in future. In light of this, I think it’s really important that, as a research community, we do our best to support each other to amend and adapt our research projects in ways that reduce the need for funded extensions where possible.
Creating more online training and resources. We are in touch with our partners, Sage, to expand your access to their online resources and will be in touch again soon on this. We are also planning new webinars on secondary data analysis and digital data collection. Other ideas welcome! As ever, our VLE will be updated with online training opportunities.
Travel. The ESRC advises that, at this time, research-related travel is ‘not essential travel’. We agree. Please do not risk your health or that of others by arranging research-related travel outside or within the UK for the next few months. Please abide by this advice and your home institution’s guidance, and try to conserve DTP funds until this advice changes.
Keeping in touch. No better time to follow us on Twitter (@SeNSSDTP) and LinkedIn! Do email us if you need to but please bear in mind that, like you, we’re all working from home, and focusing on urgent stuff first and on keeping well.
Best wishes,
Prof. Pamela Cox
SeNSS Director