The Nuffield Foundation has committed to increasing its spending to £150m over the next five years as part of a new strategy.
Published today, the foundation’s strategic review says it will spend £30m annually over the next five years on research and innovation that tackles social and economic problems in the UK.
This is an increase on the £21m spent every year in the previous five years, a spokesperson for the funder told Civil Society.
New funding priorities
The foundation said its £150m spending commitment will fund “social and economic policy research grants, with ringfenced support for work on the future of racial diversity, and ill-health and disability research”.
Its new funding priorities will include climate change and the impact of science and technological developments on society.
The document also asks five “priority questions” that will guide the foundation’s funding decisions over the next five years.
“We plan to tackle the old and new in a spirit of openness – convening expertise and iterating our approach as we learn,” the strategy reads.
“Within the framework of these questions, our grant calls will offer more specific guidance about the topics we wish to address.
“We’ll also scan the horizon for emerging issues associated with our questions and remain open to proposals on newly pertinent topics.”
The foundation said it will “place a new emphasis on funding innovative interventions and backing groundbreaking institutions that use evidence to improve lives”.
It has also reopened its strategic fund, which offers grants to “ambitious, crosscutting projects” in the range of £1m to £3m until March 2026.
More collaborative work
The strategy says the foundation will make changes to its organisation, “refining our decision-making processes and building new capability, expertise and partnerships”.
This means anticipating “needing to work in different ways to develop expertise in areas where we have a nascent knowledge base”, a spokesperson for the foundation said.
“One of the ways we’ll be doing this is to work more collaboratively with the research centres we fund to deliver on shared priorities,” they added, with work underway in areas such as education, artificial intelligence and genomics.
The strategy concludes that it “deliberately doesn’t confirm a detailed work programme, because we know that the best ideas arise from discussion, collaboration, and innovation”.
Gavin Kelly, chief executive of the Nuffield Foundation, said he has been involved in many strategy documents over the years, “and some of them try and nail down every bit of possibility about the future”.
“That’s not the spirit or purpose of this document,” he told Civil Society.
“It sets broad, ambitious questions about the future of our society that we want to get into. It gives some indication of how we want those questions to be approached. But it’s flexible too. The world will change again – we’re aware of that – and that’s part of this.
“We’re also aware that some of the areas we want to get into are newer for us than others, so we’re intentionally going to be exploratory and working with our groups, opening ourselves up through a whole process of convening conversations this autumn to feed our way into some of the questions to refine our thinking as we go along.”
Kelly added that the strategy “isn’t a blueprint for five years” but “a clear direction of travel”.
“It’s a combination of areas which we’re very familiar with and where we have deep expertise and we’ll be building on that, and some fresher agendas for us.”
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