Evaluation of AHRC World Class Labs
Publication date: 18 September 2024 | Report language: EN
The UKRI World Class Laboratories (WCL) Fund helps universities and cultural organisations / Independent Research Organisations (IROs) maintain and improve facilities and ensure researchers have access to world class laboratories, equipment, and digital resources. In 2020, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) successfully won a tranche of funding from UKRI’s World Class Laboratories (WCL) Fund expansion programme, with the specific objective to help universities and cultural organisations / Independent Research Organisations (IROs) maintain and improve their facilities. AHRC’s WCL Fund comprises three
programmes:
- Capability for Collections (CapCo), which awarded £37m through 62 grants, is a capital only fund and focused on heritage collections and heritage science research infrastructure.
- CapCo Impact Awards, which awarded £0.4m through 14 grants to provide follow-up support to CapCo grant holders to support revenue costs for a small cohort of specific, collections-led research projects.
- Creative Research Capability (CResCa), which awarded £25.5m through 23 grants to provide capital investment to support smaller specialist Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) that focus on creative and practice-based research.
To explore the impact of their WCL funds, AHRC commissioned Technopolis and BOP Consulting to undertake an evaluation to assesses the extent to which the programme, including the activities funded, is making, or has made an impact against its aims. This evaluation applied an outcome harvesting approach to explore and identify the main results of the WCL investments. This approach drew from monitoring data, desk research, a survey of grant holders and a set of wider stakeholder interviews to identify the breadth of outputs, outcomes and impacts emerging from the WCL. This evaluation of AHRC’s WCL demonstrates that the WCL grants have made a valuable contribution to enhancing the capabilities of conservation and heritage science facilities and practice-based research in the creative industries and creative arts in the UK, enhancing their research capabilities and their digital capacity.
