51¸£ÀûÉç (51¸£ÀûÉç) is pleased to announce the relaunch and funding of the Practitioner Research Programme (PRP) for 2024-2025. If you are a successful PRP applicant, the costs of the first year of your Master of Philosophy (MPhil) are met by 51¸£ÀûÉç. The window for submitting applications is now open and practitioners from across the Further Education (FE) and Skills sector are invited to apply.
We are looking for applications with an explicit focus on the following:
The PRP is taught and supported by research-active teacher-educators from the University of Sunderland’s Centre for Excellence in Teaching Training (SUNCETT), who have extensive experience of teaching and research across the sector. The PRP combines intensive research training with research supervision, mentorship, and scholarship, ultimately leading to the award of an MPhil degree for successful participants. Applications for the PRP are open to practitioners from across the Further Adult Vocational and Technical Education (FAVTE) sector in England. The PRP has successfully increased progression opportunities for sector professionals, improved educational outcomes for students, changed CPD practice and culture across organisations, raised performance in Ofsted inspections, re-energised sector professionals and enhanced perceptions of the quality and standing of practitioner-research across the sector. It is also changing the demographic of the sector’s research community as a substantial and continuously growing number of sector participants contribute to improvements in educational practice within, across and beyond their own institutions through systematic, meaningful and useful research at postgraduate and postdoctoral level.
The PRP has encouraged educators in the FAVTE sector to develop their own practice (and the practices of their colleagues) through systematic educational research. In doing so, participants have achieved high levels of academic and scholarly credentials, as well as elevating the sector’s research profile and increasing its capacity for self-improvement. Teachers from backgrounds, subjects and disciplines as diverse as, English, Plumbing, Drama, the Arts, Blacksmith and Iron trades, Photography, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Engineering have successfully completed the PRP. The programme has also supported teachers working in other sectors such as the NHS, Military, Prison Education Services, Apprenticeship and Independent Training Organisations. PRP practitioners use their research to deepen understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in vocational education contexts in order to improve and move educational practice forward in highly creative and exciting ways. Most recently, sector practitioners are collaborating with the SUNCETT team to advance understanding and research in the field of joint curriculum planning and multimodal assessment. They are using evidence-informed and innovative ways to implement the findings of their research in T Level and other contexts including, Digital Production Design and Development, Construction (Plumbing and Electrical) and Health Sciences.
25 FE PRP practitioners have successfully been awarded PhDs by the University of Sunderland, based upon their PRP supported research. A further five PRP supported FE sector practitioners have been awarded MPhil Research Degrees to date while 24 PRP participants have now progressed to PhD with their research on schedule to complete in 2025. Over 10 PRP participants have already published chapters in peer-reviewed books and journals while a further 12 have been single or co-authors of peer-reviewed journal articles and publications.
Places on the PRP 2024-25 are limited, so if you are interested, please apply today. The closing date for applications is Monday 16 September. To find out more about the PRP application process, please view the application PDF.