Last updated: 12th November 2025 by John Vines (CDT Director) and Nicola Osborne (CDT EDI Lead)

In June 2025, the UK Prime Minister announced the TechFirst programme, a “national skills drive to unlock opportunities for young people in tech”. With this, the TechExpert scheme was also announced:

“[TechExpert..] will give up to £10,000 in additional funding to 500 domestic PhD students conducting research in tech with the aim of accelerating cutting-edge innovation, strengthen the UK’s research pipeline in strategic technology sectors, and ensure that emerging talent is supported to contribute to national tech leadership.”

Our CDT was one of many similar programmes invited to opt-in to the TechExpert pilot scheme, which will provide ‘Home’ fees eligible (“domestic” to the UK) students who start in the 2026/2027 academic year a £10,000 per annum increase in their annual stipends. Further details have been provided to programmes (like ours) invited to take part in the pilot, outlining that the TechExpert funded student will have some mandatory widening participation and outreach responsibilities, alongside their doctoral training.

After much consideration and deliberation, our CDT has opted-in to the TechExpert pilot. On this page we provide our reasoning for participating, our ongoing concerns about the impacts of the programme, and what our CDT is doing to address these.

This page will be updated over time as more information about TechExpert and its impacts are understood.

Increased funding for PhD students in the UK is a positive

The TechExpert programme address a substantial problem facing research training in the UK: studying for a PhD is very poorly valued in financial terms and the levels of stipend PhD students receive is very low in the UK compared to other nations with similar GDP. Many UK graduates leave their undergraduate or postgraduate education with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt, which they struggle to pay off. With increased tuition fees for students to undertake Master’s level study over the last decade, we’ve also seen a huge drop-off in “domestic” (UK) students applying for postgraduate programmes. In technology-oriented sectors, the gap between a stipend for a PhD and salaries for graduates has increased markedly in recent years. The levels of PhD stipend also make it very difficult for those looking to undertake a PhD after working for several years to return to a substantially lower “salary” (stipend). As a CDT committed to ensuring we attract a diverse cohort, particularly those from less privileged backgrounds, we are very aware that the costs of living (especially in Edinburgh) have gone up rapidly in recent years and that can be a major barrier to those trying to live off a PhD stipend, especially for those with caring responsibilities, and/or those who lack partners or family who may be able to contribute to or share in living costs. As such we’re very supportive of an initiative to increase stipend amounts for doctoral study in the UK – especially one that increases an annual stipend by nearly 50%.

We are also very aware that there are specific challenges to be addressed with increasing the numbers of home fees applications to doctoral programmes in the UK. Our CDT has been very successful in recruiting excellent home fees students, but we still see a sharp difference in application numbers (e.g., in 2025 we received approx. 50 home fees applications, and approx. 300 overseas fees applications). Qualitative feedback from potential applicants suggest many are put off by the idea of delaying paying back students loans, worried about the cost of living, or simply not aware of what a PhD is and how it might work in practice for them.

We are therefore supportive of the underlying motivations of TechFirst and TechExpert – which is not just about increasing funding for PhD students, but also looking to widen participation in technology careers and advanced research training like PhDs. We share this desire to ensure funding and development opportunities reach those most able to benefit from them but we do have some concerns and questions around the best mechanisms for doing this.

We are concerned about the scope and implications of this pilot

Our acceptance of participating in the TechExpert pilot has taken place only after significant discussion as we have a number of key concerns about its unintended impacts and implications. Discussions between CDT team members, with our existing CDT students, and with the Directors, Managers and EDI leads of other CDT programmes, has identified a wide range of questions and concerns. This includes:

  • Because the scheme only applies to Home fees students starting in 2026/27, this creates disparities with students in other cohorts on the CDT programme, and within the same cohort between Home fees and Overseas fees students. Beyond the financial disparities this creates, we’re concerned about the impacts this will have on inter-cohort collaboration, morale, mentoring and the potential for creating tension and discontent between students.
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  • Overseas PhD students experience very high costs for studying for a PhD in the UK, and our CDT is no exception. Overseas students typically need to pay for English language tests, to apply for visas and to travel to embassies for appointments, for the UK National Health Service surcharge, and for relocation to the UK. There is very little financial support for Overseas students when onboarding to a PhD programme, and the TechExpert pilot scheme adds a significant additional economic disparity between the conditions and living costs of our Home and Overseas students.
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  • Explicitly labelling certain students as “tech experts” (as partipants in this scheme) and excluding others studying on the same programme, and working at the same (high) level, symbolically suggests those students who are not eligible for the pilot are somehow not “experts” in their topic of research.
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  • Our CDT has a strong focus on public engagement, citizen involvement, outreach and widening participation already, and existing students engage in a range of activities that are not dissimilar to the kinds of activities we understand that TechExpert is proposing – but without eligibility for the enhanced stipend. Understandably, existing students are frustrated that their existing contribution to widening participation and public engagement is not being recognised. They are also frustrated that they are ineligible to participate in these new outreach and widening participation activities for their own skills growth.
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  • The pilot programme means more experienced students on the same doctoral programme will be receiving substantially lower stipend levels to students earlier in their training. This feels unfair as a set-up, especially for those who have previously worked in industry where an enhanced salary is usually related to higher levels or greater development of experience and expertise.
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  • There is a lack of transparency around how particular CDTs and PhD programmes were selected for invitation to this programme, and why others were not. This has also made it hard to coordinate a response across multiple CDTs and share concerns and ways of mitigating these.
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  • TechExpert is a pilot scheme, and it is being evaluated to see what impacts the increase in annual stipend has on Home fees applicant numbers for the 2026 intake to CDT programmes. However, the offer of the funding to CDTs came after most CDTs had announced their calls for applications – including ours – which gives us a very short window for marketing and promoting this new scheme. As such, the timing of the announcements and confirmation of the funding means the pilot has a much-reduced potential to meaningfully impact applicant numbers. It also remains very unclear on how the impact of the pilot will be measured (e.g., currently UKRI and EPSRC do not request socio-demographic data from CDTs for their evaluations so many do not collect this, although our CDT does).
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  • In considering our own response to the invitation we not only had to consider the impact on our own CDT, but also how applications to our CDT might be impacted by the wider uptake of the pilot. We see many incredible strengths to undertaking a PhD here at University of Edinburgh, if our stipend for next year was £10k lower per student per year than to somewhat similar PhD programmes in other parts of the UK (including much less expensive places to live), we were concerned about our continued competitiveness in recruiting some of the students with the most potential.
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  • We are also concerned about the impacts the additional funding may have on CDTs and PhD programmes not participating in TechExpert (whether by choice or through not being invited) – i.e., a reduction in applicant numbers, or students withdrawing from programmes to apply for TechExpert elsewhere.
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  • Finally, while the TechExpert pilot allows CDTs and PhD programmes to uplift the stipends of Overseas students and students in other cohorts, this must be funded by means outside of the TechExpert programme. Having reviewed our CDTs finances, it’s impossible to cover the additional £1-1.5m needed to uplift all active CDT students equally from funding which is already allocated to training activities of students. Furthermore, the idea that Universities (or Industrial partners) would be able to fill this gap in funding, at such short notice, demonstrates a lack of awareness on the funding pressures UK Universities are currently facing and the general economic uncertainties being experienced across sectors in the UK and beyond.

What we will do as CDT to address these concerns

We have accepted the offer for the TechExpert funding for two reasons. First, we appreciate the intent behind this initiative and the commitment to improving access to doctoral study. Second, we wish to work together with UKRI, EPSRC and the UK Government to develop future schemes that better reflect the collaborative, equitable values that define our CDT and our collaborators in other CDTs across the UK. We are working with the assumption that we may have a higher degree of influence from participating in the pilot and its evaluation process.

As a CDT, we commit to:

  • Review the status of our finances within the CDT, and review and remodel our planned expenditure to: (1) fund students not eligible for TechExpert funding to undertake the CDTs outreach, engagement and widening participation initiatives, and: (2) identify additional support for Overseas students to ease the burden of joining the CDT from outside the UK.
  • Publish on the CDT website, and promote, open letters from CDTs, students and other organisations addressing the implications of the TechExpert programme. As appropriate, CDT Management Team members will co-sign letters.
  • Publish on the CDT website our own internal evaluation and reflections on the impacts of the TechExpert programme, including impacts on non-eligible students.
  • Continue to fund our Global Majority Fellows programme, where we bring early-career researchers and professionals from the global majority to be part of the CDT environment and promote an internationalised, diverse, multi-cultural environment for AI and NLP research.