The Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education (YCEDE) is a widening access partnership dedicated to addressing the under-representation of people of colour at the postgraduate research level. YCEDE is a collaboration of five Yorkshire universities, Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and York, plus multiple partners, including the Aziz Foundation, Stuart Hall Foundation, Sikhs in Academia, Reach Society and 12 UKRI funded doctoral programmes.
Established in 2022 and attracting >£4 million in funding from Research England, Office for Students and partner institutions, YCEDE offers significant advantages over small-scale initiatives by individual universities which often lack evidence for what works and have insufficient size to support meaningful evaluation.
From inception, partnerships and co-creation have been YCEDE’s ethos. We are collaborating and not competing with other universities to reform our campuses: We are freely sharing all of our learnings and materials on our website and social media. This includes discussions of the processes and challenges involved in working across multiple organisations with differing priorities, resources and readiness to address systemic racism. YCEDE partners are being honest about our problems and co-creating solutions with our staff and students of colour.
Beyond YCEDE, we continue to host joint workshops with other universities (including Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham Trent, East London, Durham) and sector-wide organisations including NEON and UKCGE. This is part of our ongoing evaluation and dissemination process. We believe that YCEDE’s evidence-based, collaborative and participatory approach will enable us to increase ethnic diversity and inclusion in postgraduate research in a collaborative and student-focused way.
