Guest blog by Susannah Deane, Research and Development Bid Writer (Social Sciences) at UWE Bristol
On 30th September 2026, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) held a virtual town hall to discuss changes to their funding schemes. With the closure of the current applicant-led schemes (Responsive Mode, New Investigator, and Secondary Data Analysis) on 4th November 2026, ESRC has recently announced a suite of new grants with two – Connect and React – already launching earlier this year. In the webinar, ESRC Executive Chair Stian Westlake and Executive Director of Research Jen Gold gave more details on the three new schemes opening over the next six months: Grow and Explore (opening 5th November) and Challenge (opening spring 2027).
Headline takeaways
- More flexibility in terms of budget and the types of activities that researchers can undertake under the new schemes
- Retained commitment to supporting early career researchers (ECRs)
- Focus on novelty, pushing boundaries, and responsible risk-taking
- Reduced emphasis on short-term impact
- Decreased assessment time
ESRC have stressed that UKRI’s new strategic framework continues to have curiosity-driven research at its heart, and they hope that the new schemes will provide more freedom for applicants to propose the kind of approaches that they see fit. ESRC are keen to avoid inadvertently concentrating funding in certain areas, and there is a greater emphasis on supporting work that is at the knowledge frontier, even if the impact is more distant. They are also experimenting with ways of speeding up funding processes and making the process simpler for both applicants and reviewers.
New schemes Grow, Explore, and Challenge will be launched on an always-open basis with rolling assessment.
Grow (18mths-5yrs; £100-500k)
The Grow award will be focused on researcher development, whether at an early or later career stage. It is intended to support a dynamic, flexible, and internationally competitive social science research base that can anticipate and respond to emerging priorities, technologies, and opportunities, by supporting researcher development at key career points.
A core component of this scheme is to support those starting their careers to gain experience in leading and managing a research project. Grow will also support established researchers to develop in new directions, either by applying their expertise in a different social science discipline, or by gaining and using advanced skills to drive innovation in their own field (e.g. training in data analytics techniques; using new AI technologies). With this in mind, Westlake emphasised that applications will be assessed on their own merits, rather than being compared with one another across different career stages.
Explore (up to 5yrs; £300k-2M)
Explore is being launched in recognition of the important role that small teams play in driving growth through research. This scheme focuses on supporting innovative and disruptive ideas, and encourages ambitious ideas that push disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual boundaries. Research evidence – especially from the Metascience Unit – points to the important role that small teams often play in fostering new directions in research across many different disciplines. ESRC have stressed that there is still space to have a diversity of expertise in a small central research team, and there are specific other roles which may also be included in the proposal. Projects can include international co-leads, or collaborations with business, government, or third sector in different ways.
Challenge (up to 5yrs; £2-10M)
The Challenge award will launch in spring 2027, supporting ambitious programmes of research, innovation, or infrastructure that require experienced leadership and vision to deliver tangible impactful outcomes on complex challenges facing the economy, society, and the research system. The scheme will focus on bringing together diverse expertise to build capability, and will welcome applications from large teams. While this fund will take on some of the aspects of the previous research centre grants, it will also be open to fund different types of endeavours including large research programmes, networking schemes, and field-building at scale. With this fund, ESRC are looking to fund large projects that are making an ongoing contribution, and they will be looking for specific standalone, time-bound projects. More details on this scheme will be released in later 2026.
ESRC’s commitment to early career researchers remains pivotal: note that opportunities for ECRs are not limited to the Grow awards; ESRC are keen for ECRs to be part of teams in the Explore and Challenge funds too.
Assessment & grant processing times
While the Connect pilot used distributed peer review in the assessment process, the three new awards will be based on expert peer review and moderating panels, with the opportunity to respond to peer reviews as under the current schemes, and ESRC making final funding decisions. Westlake noted that they will be taking a portfolio-based approach to final funding decisions to ensure a diverse range of funded projects, and to enable a balance of ECR and more experienced researchers to receive funding.
In addition, ESRC are working to deliver on UKRI commitments to reduce grant processing times; with that in mind, decisions for Grow and Explore awards will start to be made in spring 2027. [There is currently no demand management planned for these schemes.]
Intellectual novelty & impact
Recognising the limitations of overly focusing on short-term impact, ESRC will move away from selecting only projects that are both high short-term impact and score highly on curiosity-driven research and intellectual novelty. Instead, they aim to provide a space for projects that are primarily about pushing the knowledge frontier, where the contribution to impact may be some way down the road and not achieved within the project itself, in addition to continuing to fund good projects that are highly impact-driven. Remember that it is still extremely important to discuss the impact of your research, even if the timeline for this is longer.
Connect & React pilot awards update
With Connect and React awards having already launched earlier this year, ESRC will be reviewing these pilot schemes through to spring 2027. The expectation is that these schemes will be relaunched in 2027, but we may see some adjustments following the review period.
Keep an eye out for webinar announcements, as ESRC will be giving updates on the schemes in due course.