Consultation on greater rights for doctoral students

A consultation paper on greater rights for doctoral students has been sent out by the Ministry for Education. The document proposes that doctoral students should be employed on studentships, insurance should increase their sense of security and doctoral students who fall ill or take parental leave should have greater rights. We welcome these proposals.
The vice-chancellor signed a decision in June 2011 to entirely abolish study grants for our doctoral students from 1 January 2013. This applies throughout third-cycle studies and we have thus gone a step further than the Government’s proposal. The Government proposes that those on a doctoral grant should be given a studentship within the first year of the four-year programme.
At LU, doctoral grants are being phased out during 2012. They will be replaced with doctoral studentships or scholarships from 2013. At LU we also took a decision a couple of years ago to improve the social safety net for doctoral students on scholarships.
Job security and good terms of employment are a must if we are to recruit and retain the best doctoral students. We will now also review how we could further improve the situation of our doctoral students on scholarships. They have a poor safety net while they are funded by scholarships, even with the insurance policies we take out.