Student sponsorship

Student projects must have the primary purpose of obtaining an educational qualification. 

Projects where the educational qualification is secondary, and the main purpose is to undertake the research itself, do not fall into the category of student projects.

Before working through the approval process, you will need to ensure that your project can be defined as research.

Use this Health Research Authority decision tool to understand whether your project is research.

Please contact the Research Governance Office who will advise you on what you need to do to gain approval, and what you need to provide as evidence.

We will be able to provide a research and development approval letter once all of the appropriate checks and approvals are in place.

Please complete the Health Research Authority student research toolkit in the first instance, to check which approvals you will need, including Health Research Authority (HRA) and Research Ethics Committee (REC) approval.

Once you have completed the toolkit, please get in touch with the Research Governance Office for further support and guidance on your results.

The UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care stipulates that universities and colleges are usually expected to accept the role of Sponsor for all educational research conducted by their own students.

We can make exceptions, but this is on case-by-case basis. 

The UK Policy Framework for Health and Social Care states that students should not normally take the role of Chief Investigator (CI) at any level of study. This should be undertaken by supervisors or course leaders.

For undergraduate and master’s courses, the supervisor should always take the role of CI.

For PhD courses, the student may take the role of CI if the supervisor and the Sponsor agree that this is appropriate.

Full guidance can be found on the HRA Student Research page.