UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is in the middle of the most significant overhaul of its application and grants-management infrastructure in a generation. The UKRI new funding model consolidates the disparate systems that research offices have used for years — most notably the ageing Je-S (Joint Electronic Submission) system — into a single, browser-based UKRI Funding Service, alongside a redesigned Funding Finder for discovering live opportunities. For institutions managing a share of UKRI’s more than £8 billion in annual research and innovation funding, this is not a cosmetic IT upgrade. It changes how proposals are drafted, how organisational data is captured, and how compliance is monitored across the grant lifecycle.
For research administrators, the practical stakes are high. Application routes, data fields, and reporting obligations that have been stable — if clunky — for over a decade are being replaced council by council, scheme by scheme. Getting institutional processes aligned to the new platform, and doing so with consistent metadata practices, is now a live operational priority heading into the 2026 cycle.
What the UKRI New Funding Model Actually Changes
At its core, the transition moves application and post-award activity away from Je-S and onto the UKRI Funding Service, a modern, cloud-based platform intended to serve all seven research councils, Research England, and Innovate UK from a common front end. UKRI has been rolling this out incrementally: rather than a single cutover date, individual funding opportunities and schemes have migrated in phases, meaning many research offices are currently operating a hybrid environment — some calls still routed through Je-S, others exclusively through the new service.
Alongside the application platform itself, UKRI has overhauled UKRI Funding Finder, the public search tool researchers and administrators use to identify open and forthcoming calls. The redesigned finder is intended to reduce the friction of tracking opportunities across nine constituent councils with historically inconsistent naming conventions, deadlines, and eligibility criteria. Institutions that previously relied on manually curated spreadsheets or council-specific alerts to track UKRI funding opportunities are being encouraged to migrate to the centralised finder and its associated notification tools.
The stated ambition behind the wider UKRI funding portal consolidation is simplification: fewer bespoke application forms, a common set of reusable organisational and project data, and — eventually — a single sign-on and case-tracking experience regardless of which council is funding the work. UKRI has also continued to update its standard UKRI terms and conditions for research grants, clarifying obligations around data management, open access compliance, and financial reporting as part of the same modernisation effort.
Why This Is a Governance-Standards Issue, Not Just an IT Migration
Research offices tend to experience system migrations as a training and helpdesk problem. That framing understates what is actually at stake. Every time a funder changes its application architecture, it also changes — implicitly or explicitly — the data model institutions must feed into it: how principal investigators are identified, how organisational affiliations are recorded, how costings and terms are structured, and how outputs and outcomes are reported back.
This is precisely the territory that research information management standards exist to govern. Persistent identifiers such as ORCID for individual researchers and the Research Organization Registry (ROR) for institutions reduce the ambiguity that free-text name fields introduce into any funder’s database — ambiguity that becomes costly when a research office has to reconcile its internal systems (CRIS, HR, finance) against a funder’s records at renewal, reporting, or audit time. Where a new platform like the UKRI Funding Service standardises identifier capture at the point of application, it materially reduces downstream reconciliation work for research offices — provided institutions actually populate those fields consistently rather than treating them as optional.
The same logic applies to reporting metadata more broadly. Bodies such as DataCite and CrossRef have spent over a decade demonstrating that consistent, machine-readable metadata at the point of creation is far cheaper than retrospective clean-up. A funder-level platform consolidation is an opportunity to embed that discipline institutionally — or, if handled poorly, an opportunity to multiply inconsistency across an even larger data set.
Practical Steps for Institutional Research Offices
Ahead of further rollout through 2026, research offices should treat the transition as a data-governance exercise as much as a systems one:
- Audit current Je-S versus Funding Service coverage. Maintain an internal register of which schemes and councils have migrated, since guidance and support arrangements differ between the two systems during the transition period.
- Standardise identifier capture now. Ensure ORCID iDs are mandatory in internal proposal-approval workflows for all named investigators, and confirm the institution’s ROR identifier is used consistently wherever organisational affiliation is recorded, rather than relying on free-text institution names.
- Re-brief costing and contracts teams on updated terms and conditions. Changes to UKRI’s standard grant terms and conditions can affect audit obligations, data-sharing requirements, and financial reporting deadlines; contracts staff should not assume prior guidance still applies unchanged.
- Update internal training materials and templates. Application forms, checklists, and costing templates built around Je-S field structures may no longer map cleanly onto the Funding Service’s data model.
- Assign ownership for Funding Finder monitoring. As legacy alert mechanisms are retired, someone in the research office should own migration to the new finder’s notification tools to avoid missed deadlines during the changeover.
What This Means for Research Administrators
The immediate operational burden of the UKRI new funding model falls on research offices, not on principal investigators. Administrators are the ones reconciling which schemes sit on which platform, retraining academic staff on new interfaces, and absorbing the ambiguity of a multi-year, phased rollout rather than a single clean cutover. That burden is real, but it is also time-limited and manageable with the right internal governance discipline.
The larger, more durable implication is about data quality. Institutions that use this transition as a forcing function to standardise identifier use, tidy internal CRIS records, and align local metadata practices with the fields the Funding Service expects will find themselves with cleaner, more defensible data for REF-related reporting, funder audits, and institutional benchmarking well beyond this migration. Those that treat it purely as a login-page change will likely recreate today’s reconciliation headaches inside tomorrow’s system.
For sector bodies such as ARMA, NCURA, and EARMA, the consolidation also strengthens the case for shared guidance on identifier practice and metadata hygiene across UK and international funders — reducing the risk that every major funder’s platform change becomes a bespoke crisis for research offices to absorb alone.
Looking Ahead
UKRI’s platform consolidation will continue in phases through 2026 and beyond, and further schemes are expected to move from Je-S onto the Funding Service as confidence in the new platform grows. Research offices that get ahead of the transition — auditing coverage, enforcing identifier discipline, and refreshing internal guidance on the current terms and conditions — will be better placed to absorb whatever comes next, whether that is further UKRI consolidation or similar modernisation efforts from other national funders following the same trajectory.
Leave a Reply