Researcher Development Concordat

The Researcher Development Concordat — formally the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers — is a UK sector-wide agreement setting out shared commitments among research funders, research organizations, and researchers on improving the research environment, researcher employment conditions, and professional/career development. It was first launched in June 2008, signed by Universities UK and the major UK research funders, and substantially revised in 2019 following a national consultation, producing a shorter, clearer document organized around three principles rather than the original’s more extensive commitment list.

The Concordat is a voluntary but sector-embedded framework: an organization is not bound by external regulation to sign it, but signatory status and demonstrated implementation have become a normal expectation across UK higher education and research institutes, reinforced by the linked HR Excellence in Research Award described below.

The three principles

The 2019 revision organizes the Concordat’s commitments under three principles, each paired with specific expectations for funders, employers/managers, and researchers themselves:

• Environment and culture — research organizations and funders are expected to foster a research environment and culture in which everyone is able to achieve their full potential, recognizing equality, diversity, and inclusion, and researcher wellbeing, as integral to a productive research environment.
• Employment — researchers are expected to be employed on fair, transparent, and equitable terms, with appropriate contract types and durations, clear recruitment and progression processes, and recognition of research as a valued profession rather than a purely transitional stage before a permanent academic post.
• Professional and career development — researchers are expected to have access to, and to take responsibility for engaging with, opportunities for continuing professional development, including support to plan for careers both inside and outside academic research.

Each principle is stated as a reciprocal commitment: research organizations and funders commit to specific supporting actions, and researchers commit to engaging with the development opportunities made available to them.

Who signs, and what signing commits an organization to

The Concordat has two distinct classes of signatory:

• Research organizations (employers) — universities, research institutes, and other bodies that employ researchers. Signing commits the organization to publishing a public action plan addressing the three principles and reporting progress against it, typically supported by evidence submitted for HR Excellence in Research Award review.
• Funders — UK research funders, including UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and its constituent councils, sign as funder-signatories and publish their own action plans describing how funding terms, conditions, and schemes support the Concordat’s principles — for example, fellowship design, grant terms affecting research staff continuity, or funding conditions tied to researcher development.

The Concordat itself does not employ researchers directly; its commitments operate through what signatory organizations and funders each control — employment practice and research culture for employers, funding design and conditions for funders.

Relationship to the HR Excellence in Research Award

The HR Excellence in Research Award is the peer-reviewed recognition process through which UK research organizations demonstrate implementation of the Concordat’s principles in practice. Vitae coordinates the award process in the UK. An institution applies with evidence of its action plan and progress; successful institutions are recognized as demonstrating a sustained commitment to supportive working conditions, researcher professional and career development, inclusive research environments, and open, transparent recruitment and progression processes. Award-holding institutions undergo periodic review to retain recognition, rather than a one-off assessment.

The award traces back to the European Commission’s endorsement, from 2007, of UK research organizations’ commitment to the principles of the European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers — the Concordat is the UK sector’s domestic implementation vehicle for those broader European principles, and the HR Excellence in Research Award is the mechanism through which that implementation is externally verified.

How this differs from Athena SWAN and the Race Equality Charter

Research administrators sometimes conflate the Researcher Development Concordat with Advance HE’s equality charters because all three are UK institutional commitment frameworks with published action plans and periodic external review. They are, however, distinct instruments with different scope, governance, and assessment structure:

• The Researcher Development Concordat addresses the researcher employment and career-development lifecycle broadly, for all researchers, stewarded by the Concordat Strategy Group with Vitae coordinating the linked HR Excellence in Research Award. There is no tiered award — an institution either holds current HR Excellence in Research Award recognition or it does not.
• The Athena SWAN Gender Equality Charter, run by Advance HE, addresses gender equality specifically, using a Bronze/Silver/Gold tiered award structure applied for at institution and department level.
• The Race Equality Charter (REC), also run by Advance HE, addresses race equality specifically, using Bronze/Silver tiers (no Gold), with a process that closely mirrors Athena SWAN’s self-assessment and evidence-based application model.

These frameworks are complementary, not competing: a research organization can hold Concordat implementation (via HR Excellence in Research Award recognition) alongside Athena SWAN and/or Race Equality Charter awards, and many UK universities do hold more than one concurrently. Research administrators tracking institutional compliance commitments should treat them as separate reporting obligations with separate evidence requirements, even though the underlying goal — a supportive, equitable research environment — overlaps.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Researcher Development Concordat mandatory?

No. It is a voluntary sector agreement, not a statutory or regulatory requirement. In practice, signatory status and HR Excellence in Research Award recognition are widely treated as a normal expectation for UK research organizations and are sometimes referenced in funder due-diligence or research-culture reporting, but there is no legal obligation to sign.

Does the Concordat apply outside the UK?

The Concordat itself is a UK sector instrument. It implements, at the UK level, principles drawn from the European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers, which has broader European application through the European Commission’s HRS4R (Human Resources Strategy for Researchers) scheme — a related but separately administered process outside the UK.

Who is covered by the term “researcher” under the Concordat?

The Concordat’s 2019 revision defines its scope broadly, covering researchers at all career stages employed by signatory organizations — not only early-career or postdoctoral researchers — and extends to research-focused staff beyond conventional academic contract types.