Innovation and Scholarship Fund

The Innovation and Scholarship Fund supports colleagues working on smaller teaching and learning projects and initiatives. Colleagues can apply for funding from £100 to £2,500 per project, providing financial backing for ideas that can enhance our educational practices.

This fund is designed to encourage scholarship and dissemination across the breadth of our teaching community, to support specific enhancement activities in teaching and learning (rather than to support ongoing or 'business as usual' activity). This may include, for example, accessing funding to compensate students for their time in consultative or collaborative activities (vouchers) or to facilitate scholarship activity with sector colleagues focused on enhancement of teaching.

All University of Manchester staff are eligible to apply to the fund, provided you are on a permanent contract or a fixed term contract that includes the period of time in which the proposed activity and its evaluation would take place. As part of your application, you will need to outline how your proposal will benefit teaching and learning across the University and/or more widely, what the outputs of your activity will be, and how you will evaluate the impact of this work.

Applications will be reviewed every two months by a panel, and will be considered on the basis of the content of the application. Please note that the Innovation and Scholarship Fund is a limited fund, and therefore we would encourage you to submit your application as soon as you are ready to do so rather than wait for a later panel.

Funding and support for teaching and learning development may also be available from your School or Faculty.

If you are interested in undertaking a Further Education (FE) or Higher Education (HE) course, please visit the Learning and Organisational Development website for more information about the University's FE/HE Funding Scheme.

Upcoming deadline

The Innovation and Scholarship Fund Panel due to take place in February 2025 has been rescheduled to March 2025. If you are considering submitting a bid to the fund, please note that submissions received by 12pm on Wednesday 5 March will be considered at the next panel. Any applications that were already submitted for the 19 February deadline will automatically be considered at the March panel (there is no need to resubmit).

Contact

If you have any queries about the Innovation, please contact the Teaching Excellence team

email: teaching.learning@manchester.ac.uk.

Frequently asked questions

Will conference attendance be funded?

While we appreciate that conference attendance funding opportunities vary across disciplinary areas and roles across the institution, in most cases we will not be able to fund conference attendance (for staff or students) from this resource. The fund is designed to enable specific enhancement activity that can have a practical impact on the quality of teaching and learning.

Can activities be funded retrospectively?

The Innovation and Scholarship Fund is unable to fund activity retrospectively; any funding would need to be applied for and agreed prior to the activity taking place.

Can activities in the next academic year be funded?

Any agreed resource from the Innovation and Scholarship Fund would need to be for costs payable in the current financial year, i.e. for spending before the end of July 2025 in line with the UoM financial year.

Can staff working hours be funded?

The Innovation and Scholarship Fund is unable to pay for staff working hours, and so this nature of payment would not be possible from this source of funding.

Do I need approval from anyone else before I submit an application?

Depending on the activity you propose, it may be important to gain agreement in principle from the relevant programme leader, head of department, school head of education or equivalent. Where this is the case, we advise that you detail the relevant approval that has been given in your application.

Can I apply for funding for course enhancement activities?

Applications should outline how the activity proposed will have impact that can benefit broadly across teaching and learning, and should not be focused on delivering ‘business as usual’ activity and/or teaching and learning enhancement that is limited to a course or one cohort of students only.