Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) Explained

A Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP) is a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded doctoral training model in which a lead university, or a consortium of universities, receives a broad, multidisciplinary allocation of funded PhD studentships and distributes them — largely at its own or the consortium’s discretion — across many separate research topics and supervisors, rather than around a single themed, shared curriculum. Most UKRI-funded doctoral research in the UK is delivered this way. This is the feature that most clearly distinguishes a DTP from a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT): a DTP is a funding envelope spread across many individually-supervised projects inside a broad subject remit, not a single cohort-locked programme with its own shared taught curriculum and one governing theme.

Five UKRI research councils have run DTPs at meaningful scale — the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC), and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) having run the model until its final DTP-funded cohort in October 2025. Since UKRI’s Doctoral Training Investment Framework took effect from January 2024, new competitions are no longer badged “DTP” — the successor category is the Doctoral Landscape Award — but “DTP” remains the correct, and still overwhelmingly searched-for, term for the large number of live, currently-recruiting partnerships that predate the framework change.

How a DTP allocates funding: two real models

“DTP” covers two structurally different allocation mechanisms, both sharing the same defining feature (broad remit, many individually-supervised projects) but differing in who decides where the money goes:

Formula-based block grant to a single institution. EPSRC allocates DTP funding directly to individual universities, calculated from a formula based on each institution’s recent EPSRC research grant income and fellowship activity — in a past allocation round this ranged from roughly £477,000 to £15.5 million per institution. The receiving university then has wide discretion over how to spend it: it can fund a studentship for anywhere between three and four years, mix full-time, part-time, and placement-based awards, and convert up to 10% of its allocation into EPSRC Doctoral Prize (PhD Plus) extensions, with EPSRC setting institutions a target for converting a share of DTP funding into industry-co-funded CASE studentships.
Competitively-awarded, multi-institution consortium. ESRC, NERC, BBSRC, and MRC instead run open competitions in which a lead university or a regional consortium of universities (often with non-academic partners attached) bids for a DTP award covering several years of studentship cohorts. The winning partnership then allocates the studentships it has been awarded across its own partner institutions and eligible research topics, subject to the funding council’s subject remit and any strategic priorities attached to the round.

In both cases, the entity that applied for and holds the DTP award (the university, or the consortium’s lead institution) is the one making individual studentship-allocation decisions — UKRI funds the partnership as a broad capacity-building investment, not a single named research programme.

Which UKRI research councils fund DTPs, and at what scale

The scale, competition structure, and current status of the DTP model differ noticeably by council:

ESRC runs 15 existing DTPs covering the breadth of the social sciences, with its 2024 competition expanding this to up to 16 partnerships across 73 participating research organisations. The round supports up to 500 studentships a year across five cohorts, split between roughly 350 allocated responsively by institutional capacity and quality and 150 allocated strategically to reward priority areas and inclusive partnerships. A standard ESRC studentship runs 3.5 years — the extra six months (beyond the more typical three years) covers a compulsory three-month Research in Practice placement plus further specialist training.
NERC has run three successive DTP phases: DTP1 (2014–2018, 15 partnerships across five annual intakes), DTP2 (2019–2023, 17 partnerships, around 235 notional studentships a year at launch), and DTP3 (applications opened January 2024, first cohort starting October 2025). NERC is deliberately rebalancing capacity toward its Centres for Doctoral Training as part of this transition — DTP-funded studentship numbers step down to around 185 a year from DTP3, while NERC CDT studentships rise from 24 a year to 96 a year by 2026/27.
BBSRC funds a network of regional DTPs, each set up by an individual university or a group of universities in the same region together with non-university partners, covering the full range of bioscience subject areas. A three-month professional placement outside the student’s immediate PhD topic is a standard training component across BBSRC DTPs. Across all of its doctoral training mechanisms combined, BBSRC reports having funded around 14,000 notional studentships over the past three decades.
MRC awarded 17 DTPs in July 2021 covering three annual intake years (2022–2024), each funded on the basis of a “notional studentship” — the equivalent of one four-year studentship costed at the UKRI minimum stipend and support rate.
EPSRC is the largest single funder of UKRI doctoral training overall, but delivers most of that funding through the formula-allocated block-grant DTP described above rather than through its (separately competed, thematically-locked) CDTs — the two mechanisms run in parallel at EPSRC, funding different things in different ways.
AHRC ran DTPs as its main PhD funding route through two phases (DTP1, then DTP2), but October 2025 was the final DTP-funded cohort. From 2026, AHRC funding moves to its Future Doctoral Provision Programme — a formula-based Doctoral Landscape Award allocating funding directly to up to 50 individual higher education institutions, each supporting a cohort of 15 full-time PhD students (three admitted per year across a five-year cycle) rather than through a competed multi-institution consortium.

Individual competition terms, cohort sizes, and funding splits change from round to round — a research administrator scoping a specific council’s current DTP or Landscape Award provision should always check that council’s live UKRI opportunity page rather than assume a past round’s figures still apply.

Funding structure: stipend, fees, and training budget

Whichever council or allocation model is involved, an individual DTP studentship resolves into the same three funding components as any other UKRI-funded doctorate:

Stipend. A tax-free living-cost payment to the student, at or above UKRI’s published minimum doctoral stipend — £20,780 a year for 2025/26, rising to £21,805 a year from 1 October 2026, with an additional £2,000 a year London weighting (unchanged since 2006). Individual DTPs, and their industry or partner co-funders, may pay above this floor.
Fees. Tuition fees paid to the host institution at the UKRI-approved rate, for the studentship’s full registered duration — which, unlike a CDT’s more standard four years, can genuinely vary by DTP and by individual studentship, from three years up to around four and a half depending on the council, the specific award, and whether a placement or additional training period is built in.
A training/research support budget. The Research Training Support Grant (RTSG) — the standard UKRI training-grant budget line, alongside stipend and fees, covering consumables, equipment, fieldwork, and conference or placement travel. DTPs also typically draw on this line, or an equivalent partnership-level training allocation, to fund cohort-wide development activities (residentials, shared skills training, the placement/Research-in-Practice components several councils build into their DTP studentships) even though, unlike a CDT, a DTP studentship’s day-to-day research programme is individually supervised rather than built around a shared taught curriculum.

DTP vs CDT: the core administrative distinction

DTPs and CDTs are easy to conflate — both are UKRI-funded, both are typically administered by a lead university or a consortium, both now sit inside the same Doctoral Training Investment Framework, and both are frequently run in parallel by the same research council. The distinction that actually matters for how each is administered:

A DTP is a broad funding envelope. The host institution or consortium recruits and allocates studentships across a wide range of topics and supervisors within its subject remit, largely at institutional or partnership discretion, without every student in a given year sharing a single themed research programme, a fixed joint curriculum, or a dedicated centre director and management structure.
A CDT is theme-locked and programme-locked. Every student recruited into a given CDT cohort is admitted against the same thematic call, follows a shared taught/training curriculum alongside their individual project, and the centre itself — not just the host institution generally — is the administrative unit UKRI funds, monitors, and reports against. See CASRAI’s Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) guide for the full detail on that model, including its cohort-recruitment structure, taught-component requirements, and its own funding and reporting mechanics.

UKRI’s own current terminology now tracks this exact distinction: the successor to the DTP category is the Doctoral Landscape Award — described in UKRI’s framework guidance as supporting broad, diverse research and allowing “award holders to define specific studentship topics within broadly defined disciplinary areas” — while the successor to the CDT category is the Doctoral Focal Award, for a concentration of studentships built around one strategic theme or challenge with a tailored, shared training programme. UKRI’s framework guidance states plainly that “ongoing doctoral training partnerships (DTPs) align with doctoral landscape awards, as do many of our previous collaborative schemes (like CASE)”, while “ongoing centres for doctoral training (CDTs) align with doctoral focal awards.”

The underlying shift is structurally comparable to how the European Commission consolidated its own Marie Skłodowska-Curie doctoral funding — see CASRAI’s guide to Innovative Training Networks (ITN) and MSCA Doctoral Networks — toward consortium-delivered, structured training, though the EU and UKRI mechanisms are not directly interchangeable and shouldn’t be treated as equivalents in a funding application or compliance context.

DTPs inside UKRI’s current doctoral funding framework

UKRI’s Doctoral Training Investment Framework, part of its wider “collective talent funding” approach and dated November 2023, reorganised doctoral training investment around the two award types described above from January 2024 onward. In practice, this means: existing, currently-recruiting DTPs continue to operate and are still described as DTPs on their own pages, on their host universities’ sites, and in the funding literature students actually search — “Doctoral Training Partnership” remains the correct term for that live body of awards, and will stay in day-to-day use for as long as those cohorts are recruiting and reporting. A research administrator scoping a genuinely new UKRI doctoral funding competition, however, should expect it to be published as a Doctoral Landscape Award (broad, DTP-equivalent) rather than search for “DTP” as a live, open competition category going forward; several councils — NERC and AHRC among them — have already published explicit rebalancing or transition plans moving allocation away from the legacy DTP name and toward Landscape Award-badged provision.

What this means in practice for research administrators

Supporting a DTP-funded studentship — whether as the lead institution’s research office, a consortium partner, or a co-funding non-academic partner — differs in several concrete, practical ways from supporting a themed CDT studentship:

Allocation decisions sit with the institution or consortium, not with UKRI directly. Once a council awards a DTP (whether as a formula-based block grant or a competed consortium award), the receiving institution or partnership makes its own decisions about which supervisors, topics, and students receive funded places, subject to the council’s remit and any strategic conditions — this is genuinely different governance from a CDT, where the funded centre itself controls recruitment against one fixed theme.
Individual studentships, not a shared curriculum, are the primary reporting unit. Because a DTP doesn’t run a single shared taught programme the way a CDT does, monitoring and reporting focus much more heavily on individual studentship progress, though partnership-level cohort activity (training weeks, placements, partner-institution coordination) still needs its own reporting where the council requires it.
Consortium partner agreements still need active management wherever a DTP spans more than one institution — the same category of instrument covered in CASRAI’s consortium agreement, grant consortium partner, and grant consortium coordinator entries, and, where an industry or other non-academic partner co-funds a placement, the territory covered in CASRAI’s guide to industry-university research partnerships.
Terminology in current competitions has shifted. When scoping new UKRI doctoral funding opportunities rather than administering an existing DTP-funded cohort, search and monitor for “Doctoral Landscape Award” alongside “Doctoral Training Partnership” — UKRI’s live opportunity listings increasingly use the newer term for what is functionally the same broad, multidisciplinary allocation model.
Duration and cost profiles vary more than for a CDT. Because individual DTP studentships can run anywhere from three years up to around four and a half depending on the council and the specific award, budget and reporting timelines need checking studentship-by-studentship rather than assumed from a single centre-wide duration.

Frequently asked questions

What’s the actual difference between a DTP and a CDT?

A DTP is a broad funding envelope: the host institution or consortium allocates studentships across many individually-supervised topics within its subject remit. A CDT is theme-locked and programme-locked: every student in a cohort is recruited against the same theme and follows a shared taught curriculum, with the centre itself — not just the host institution — as the funded administrative unit.

How many DTPs does UKRI fund?

It varies by council and changes with each competition round. As examples: ESRC runs 15 existing DTPs (up to 16 from its 2024 round); NERC has run 15–17 partnerships across each of its three DTP phases; MRC awarded 17 DTPs in its July 2021 round. There is no single UKRI-wide total, since each council runs its own competition on its own cycle.

How long does a DTP-funded PhD take?

It depends on the council and the individual award — commonly three to three-and-a-half years, though EPSRC’s formula-allocated DTP funding lets institutions fund anywhere from three to four years, and ESRC’s standard studentship runs 3.5 years to accommodate a compulsory placement and additional training.

Is “Doctoral Training Partnership” still the right term to search for?

For an existing, currently-recruiting partnership, yes — that’s still the term those partnerships and their host universities use. For a brand-new UKRI doctoral funding competition, expect UKRI to badge it as a Doctoral Landscape Award instead; UKRI’s own framework guidance describes ongoing DTPs as aligning with, and effectively continuing under, that category.

Do all UKRI research councils fund DTPs the same way?

No. EPSRC allocates DTP funding as a formula-based block grant directly to individual universities, which then decide internally how to spend it. ESRC, NERC, BBSRC, and MRC instead run competitive awards to a lead institution or regional consortium, which then allocates the studentships it wins across its own partners. AHRC ran a DTP model through two phases before moving, from 2026, to a formula-based Doctoral Landscape Award allocated directly to individual institutions rather than consortia.