Inquiry process
Inquiry Orientation Meetings
June-July 2025
In June 2025, we met with our Community Reference Group in Manchester to share and reflect on our Call for Evidence Summary Report, and discuss how we take this forward. A key takeaway from this session was the group's emphasis on the role of research culture, highlighting how many of the issues raised are as much about behaviours and values within the HEI context as they are about systems and structures.
We then presented our final report to the Inquiry Panel in Liverpool in July. We heard from funders and other key stakeholders across the sector, and discussed how to move from insight to action in what many acknowledged is a crowded and sometimes contradictory landscape. A key question emerged from this session: How do we ensure this work lands and makes a difference
Below you'll find live scribes from our discussions, as well as a video from the day.
Live scribes
Video
Coming soon
Where next?
Cross-sector engagement Workshops, June & September 2024
In June 2024 we held a workshop in Sheffield to introduce the Inquiry to researchers drawn primarily from the Universities of Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester.
We invited the 60+ participants to 'air their dirty laundry in public', identifying challenges they had experienced in the field which related to specific processes or structures within their own universities. They then wrote postcards to the person or team that might be able to address the problem - most often the Directors of Finance and Operation, Directors of Research, or UKRI/funding bodies.
The workshop highlighted that people often feel 'isolated' trying to navigate different systems and processes. Yet there are a vast range of similar experiences across multiple organisations, sectors and disciplines and knowledge of how institutional conditions support or limit co-produced research.
The June workshop revealed the creativity and imagination that researchers and professional services staff show when coming up with ways to do co-produced or participatory research in systems that are not designed for it.
This theme was picked up in the second workshop in September 2024, which was part of 'MethodsCon' 2024, organised by the National Centre for Research Methods in Manchester.
Co-production requires navigating diverse structures, cultures, and levels of bureaucracy across different organisations. This demands understanding formal structures and systems and recognising the informal practices that enable researchers to get things done.
Below you'll find scribes summarising discussions from our Sheffield workshop.
Live scribes
