The Royal Society’s Partnership Scheme is a funding opportunity for UK schools to work in partnership with a practicing STEM professional. Intended to fund projects with an investigative bent and a clear goal to benefit pupils it sounds pretty ideal, doesn’t it?
However, part of the project eligibility criteria states:
Projects must demonstrate an appropriate level of innovation and therefore not be part of continuous project schemes and established outreach programmes.
At first glance this might seem reasonable – innovation is good, right? But the implications that established projects can’t be innovative is actually quite confusing. What’s more, it’s criteria like this that leaves so many otherwise great projects floundering after the first year, unable to ‘bed in’ and establish themselves as anything other than a flash in the pan.
Further down in the judging criteria it states simply that they are looking for ‘sustainability’. Clearly these projects need to have a plan to exist beyond the initial set-up for them to be of use to the communities they’re intended for. And yet without funding to continue the good work a project’s cost must be absorbed by the partners or it will die.
You can’t even re-apply to the Partnership Grant to continue your scheme without changing it somehow. If your investigation takes longer than you thought, engages the students so much that they want to continue with it or requires additional time because of internal or external factors, too bad.
Previous recipients of a Partnership Grant may apply for further funding, as long as the new application is made one year or more after the previous application. All applicants must ensure that the new project is not a simple extension of the previous one and must involve a new investigation.
One of my most exciting and successful partnerships has been growing since 2013. While the project itself has maintained the same aims and content we have been able to slowly build from engaging one after-school club to two primary school classes and finally to our ultimate goal of working with five primary school classes and their feeder secondary school beginning next year. Without the scope to slowly grow this partnership and learn as we went along we never would have reached this point, and I’m sure that’s true of many successful partnerships. The STEM professionals need time to prove themselves trustworthy and capable, and their community partners need to embed the projects within their many other commitments and pulls on their time.
Funders need to understand that partnership working and high quality projects take time. Refusing to consider applications from established projects hurts both those projects and the ones that are successfully funded, for they are soon to become the established programmes now ineligible for further money. Let’s have a culture of support that recognises the need for long-term projects and puts its money where its mouth is when it talks about sustainability.
letstalkaboutscience 