Unintended barriers?

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After several weeks of waiting I finally found out the results of my Pre-Application Support grant. Sadly, it was a no.

At first I was really disappointed. Then I was angry, frustrated and exhausted. After some time to process the decision, I still feel those things, but much less keenly.

Mostly, what I feel is confused.

The NIHR Pre-Application Support Fund is intended to “provide extra support to those who need it to produce a competitive NIHR application…This scheme provides funding to enhance the opportunities available to those that otherwise would not have sufficient support to apply for NIHR career development funding.”

As a PPI Lead, I am not a clinician. Neither am I registered with any professional body*, as there isn’t one for PPI/PPIE work. This means that I can’t access the vast majority of the NIHR’s career development funding schemes, as I am automatically ineligible. This scheme and the Pre-Doctoral scheme (which I have applied to once before) are the only two I can access.

*(I would be extremely cautious about establishing a professional body for PPI along the lines of other existing bodies, for reasons I will go into in another post.)

The NIHR website goes on to explain: “This scheme enables us to make a positive impact on groups and professions identified as underrepresented within NIHR. We particularly encourage applications from:..social work and public health professionals; researchers in methodology, applicants from ethnic minority backgrounds, applicants who are disabled…”

“The funding can cover: other costs where the support you will need extends beyond the categories above (visit our application guidance for examples), salary support to buy out the necessary time to prepare your application, relevant training and development, mentorship or supervisory costs.”

So there’s an acknowledgement that applicants will need training and additional support to help them achieve their aim of applying for a Pre-Doctoral grant. Yes, you read that right: this is a grant to help you apply for another grant.

So I had all of this in mind when putting my application for the Pre-App grant together. It’s worth adding at this stage that the process of applying for the Pre-App grant is not easy: there are eight in-depth questions requiring answers of between 500 and 1,000 words, plus a GANTT chart and a detailed budget. Alongside this the host organisation had to produce a statement of support for your application of up to 1,000 and anyone involved in your application (your line manager, the finance manager and your two supervisors) also have to be registered on the ARAMIS website and they each have to approve and then validate your application before it can be formally submitted.

Remember: this is a grant to help you apply for another grant.

I was therefore quite disappointed and somewhat baffled when the reviewers sent the following feedback:

“Important area of research for us to have a greater understanding of PPI involvement. However the methodology is unclear at present…”

“The applicant is in a PPI role with no research time, though has obtained a research internship award.”

“The applicant does not appear to have received formal research methods training…”

Grant applications are always very competitive and I absolutely accept that there will be times when an application review score simply won’t be quite enough to cross the threshold. There are always ways to better phrase, articulate and explain what someone wants to do in a research proposal, and that’s certainly a skill I want to improve on.

But what I do find disheartening is being pulled up on things like an ‘unclear methodology’, or lacking ‘formal research training’. That’s why I’m applying for the grant: to help me gain formal research skills and to develop an understanding of different methodologies, so that I can be better at this work.

Sadly, this was also my experience with my previous application for a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and other NIHR funding streams. There appears to be an expectation that applicants will already be working at the standard of an experienced professional; that they will already have the skills, knowledge and experience to deliver the research project at a high quality. But of course in reality, many applicants won’t know how to do these things, because they haven’t learnt how to do them yet.

Applicants are being asked to talk about technical and academic elements of research practice such as methodologies and data analysis techniques, but they’ve never done these things before – which is why they’re applying to do the training. It’s the applicant’s supervisors who will suggest key words to include, or proposed methodologies to incorporate, because they know what these things are and have been using them in their practice already. The applicant won’t know these things because they haven’t learnt them yet.

Which leaves us in a rather tricky place. It’s almost a chicken-and-egg scenario: you can only get funding if you can prove that you’re working to a very high standard and can use the right words to explain what you want to do. But how do you get funding if don’t yet have that knowledge and skills and need a grant to fund your time and pay for training?

The same is true for standard research funding: people who already have a proven track record in research (lots of grants and lots of academic papers) are far more likely to be successful in a grant application than someone with no published papers and no successful grant bids. Which means that people with fresh ideas and innovative solutions won’t get funded because they’re deemed to be too inexperienced and therefore too much of a risk to waste public money on.

These things feel like unintended barriers: things which aren’t necessarily put in place to actively block access for people to enter the research space, but which do make it significantly harder.

I have ADHD, and whilst I’m good at writing and engaging with different audiences, I find these application processes exhausting and draining. The GANTT chart generates an interesting, very negative reaction in me, (which I haven’t got to the bottom of yet) and once written, I will never look at it again, because it doesn’t suit my learning style and isn’t how I chose to organise myself or do project management.

So how is someone supposed to break into this space and gain the skills and knowledge they need, when the application process is structured in a way that keeps people out rather than finding ways to draw them in…?

Answers on a postcard,,,