Projects

Project Lead: Professor Simon Pemberton, School of Life Sciences
Project Award: £12,911
Project Summary:

This research project considers the implications of the UK Government's levelling up agenda for rural areas through a focus on rural Staffordshire. The Levelling Up White Paper - published in February 2022 by the UK Government - offers relatively little detail on how rural areas of the UK will be transformed through activities focused on spreading opportunity and prosperity to all parts of the country. Indeed, in the 332-page White Paper, there are just 39 references to rural areas. Consequently, this project involves research and knowledge exchange with local and sub-regional public policy makers to explore the ways in which the new Rural Economic Strategy for Staffordshire (2022-2027) may contribute to the delivery of the national levelling up agenda for rural communities across Staffordshire.

More specifically, through focusing and bringing together two strategic priority areas detailed in Staffordshire County Council's Rural Economic Strategy - namely 'Improving Connectivity and Access' and 'Regenerating the Rural Hub Towns' - this project will examine the importance and role of new forms of electric vehicle (EV) mobility in rural areas to address challenges of rural accessibility and connectivity. This is important for several reasons. First, relatively little has been published to date on how a ""just transition"" to EV mobility can be secured in rural areas, and in so doing contribute to both the 'NetZero' agenda as well as facilitating rural regeneration and wider prosperity for rural communities. Second, there has also been less focus on the potential nature of sustainable mobility solutions (such as EV car sharing schemes) in rural areas that lack the public transport networks of urban areas. Third, the limited development of EV charge point provision in rural areas (and especially through the private sector) could additionally lead to such areas being left behind as “charging deserts” and negatively impact on EV take up for those living in the rural as well as deterring others with EVs from travelling to or through such areas. In turn, this may detrimentally impact on rural economies.

On a practical level, the research - to be developed in conjunction with Staffordshire County Council - will involve semi-structured interviews (30 in total) with local stakeholders to examine the ways in which different forms of EV mobility (e.g. E-scooters/ E-bikes; E-cars; E-car sharing) and public infrastructures for EV charging can be developed in the context of different rural places - such as the Rural Hub Towns - for the benefit of different rural actors. Such actors include local businesses (for example, tourism operators) and local residents, and with a specific focus on issues concerned with the importance of gender and disability in shaping the use of EV mobility and public charging infrastructure. We will also hold a 'Policy Cafe' whereby different stakeholders - including the local authority, local residents, local businesses and other public and voluntary sector partners - will be brought together to i) highlight gaps in accessibility and connectivity which could be filled through new forms of EV mobility; and ii) identify the potential for Rural Hub Towns to act as EV charging locations to benefit wider rural areas. Subsequently, the research will inform the development - with partners - of i) a wider UKRI funding application focused on the development of new rural mobility technologies in rural areas; and ii) an application to the Leverhulme Trust to establish a new Centre for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods at Keele University.

Project Lead: Dr Jane Krishnadas, School of Law
Project Award: £8,000
Project Summary:

In April 2022, it will be a decade since the Community Legal Outreach Collaboration Keele, responded to the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act's (2012) significant withdrawal of legal aid in private family law proceedings. The Community Legal Outreach Collaboration Keele (CLOCK) directly applied Krishnadas' 'Transformative Methodology' (2008,2018) to listen to the experience of those marginalised to transform systems to create intersectional, reciprocal and holistic processes for change.

This proposal seeks to trace and amplify CLOCK's research findings, through the collation of data for applications for assistance in the Family Court, in order to inform policy interventions regarding the significant withdrawal of legal aid in private family law. Through this multi-agency approach we have identified an increase in referrals from Stoke on Trent Children Services, CAFCASS, New Era, Schools and GP surgeries, creating a national concern that the risk of harm to children is being transferred from publicly funded Public Care proceedings, to the non-funded private law proceedings. Research has demonstrated that there is a national gap in the way that evidence based research has been collated across the public and private family court in silos. CLOCK will provide a multi-agency response to collate the data, through a small scale project of individual empirical interviews for litigants in person who have experienced the public and private family law proceedings, alongside the comparative study of CLOCK cases in Sussex and York and the wider impact of LASPO in the family court.

Project Lead: Dr Helen Wells, School of Social Sciences
Project Award: £15,000
Project Summary:

For a period of two months between mid May and mid July 2022, the NPCC roads policing portfolio lead (Sussex Chief Constable Jo Shiner) would like me to work alongside her with her portfolio to reimagine UK policing's approach to the prevention, detection and prosecution of drink and drug driving. This project will involve me working alongside a designated Commander (equivalent of an Assistant Chief Constable) and a Superintendent from the Metropolitan Police, as well as a Working Group of other key partners to explore alternative approaches to this growing crime and road safety problem and bring about their delivery. The intended NPCC output from this work package is the delivery of a new and co-ordinated national summer campaign (including education and enforcement elements) in August 2022, informing a major national campaign to coincide with the World Cup and Christmas 2022.

Drink driving has, for some years, been considered to be a problem that has largely been solved, with it commonly described as having been rendered 'socially unacceptable'. In the last two years, however, data shows an alarming increase in positive breath tests obtained by the police – despite a significant reduction in the number of tests carried out (tests have fallen from 175,000 on 2012 to 42,000 in 2021 but positive results have increased from 4.1% to 17.5% with no indication that police targeting practices have changed). The NPCC wishes to understand the possible explanations for these figures and to think differently about possible solutions. DfT estimates are that around 230 people are killed each year in collisions involving a driver over the drink/drive limit, and that this is a factor in at least 5% of all collisions.

Drug driving is an area of impaired driving that is believed to have grown exponentially in recent years, but which suffers from a lack of data. There is evidence of co-presence of drink and drugs for many offenders, but broadly it is an offence that is both complex and relatively poorly understood. In other cases, the two methods of impairment relate to vastly different populations and behaviours. The limited drug data available highlights drug driving has been increasing year on year. The drug driving law changes have led to a dramatic increase in drug driving enforcement which has continued to 2021. However, drug driving enforcement remains significantly lower than drink drive enforcement.

Both offences contribute to a flatlining of the numbers of people killed and seriously injured on UK roads in recent years, following decades of reductions. This flatlining is a large part of the motivation behind the NPCCs desire to think differently about how it approaches impaired driving – hence this project.

My role would be as a critical friend for existing policy and practice, and the interpretation of data, as well as a source of evidence-based possible solutions to the problem. As a criminologist, and in my role as Director of the Roads Policing Academic Network I am uniquely well-placed to ensure that the NPCC can benefit from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives on the issue, as well as from frontline experience both from the UK and from the large number of international RPAN members.

Project Lead: Dr Aneta Hayes, School of Social Sciences
Project Award: £7,724
Project Summary:

This grant aims to champion data science to develop a proposal for new metrics for assessing teaching excellence in higher education. The proposal responds to the governments’ priority to propose new statistical methodologies under the Teaching Excellence Framework and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF) and to develop ‘educational gains’ metrics by Sept 2022 (Government response to Dame Shirley Pearce’s Independent Review of the TEF, 2021).

Under this proposal, Nick Garnett and I are partnering to combine our expertise of educational data analysis to model sample OfS and ONS data (e.g. NSS, UKES, DLHE) to show how an alternative metric for assessing teaching excellence could work. We then wish to put this proposal to OfS, ONS and ADR UK (in a knowledge exchange event and wider policy impact conference) to:

a) connect with and gain support from OfS, ONS and ADR UK to co-produce a robust ‘metric’, data analyses, data and resources for future users that can inform government’s decisions about how to measure relationality between characteristics of teaching and student educational gains

b) strengthen engagement between government and academia through combining the expertise of OfS, ONS and ADR UK with our expertise in applying statistical analyses to critical studies of education policy.

By achieving points a) and b), the proposed research will enable us to build a network of policy and analytical professionals within government and give us an opportunity to show how linked data under the TEF can be effectively and robustly used on a large scale for capturing the relationship between characteristics of teaching and student educational gains.

To be able to show this relationship in relevant metrics is now pressing not only in the UK, but also internationally, under frameworks such as AHELO, CALOHEE, the Australian version of the TEF, and in the OECD project ‘Global Teaching Insights, formerly known as TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey). These projects, like the TEF, have been criticised and, in some cases, even put on hold, due to the lack of adequate statistical approaches enabling robust comparisons of linked data on a global scale (e.g. Altbach, 2015). Combining OfS, ONS and ADR UK and our expertise can help the UK government to design and operationalise in practice a flagship assessment of teaching excellence that can place the UK in a leading position of such assessments internationally.

We will use the work under this QR proposal to inform our bid to ESRC’s Secondary Data Analysis Initiative (SDAI), which we plan to submit immediately after the end of the QR project (mid-July 2022).

Project Lead: Professor Zoe Robinson, School of School of Life Sciences
Project Award: £11,075
Project Summary:

A key component of the government’s Net Zero Strategy (BEIS, 2021) is to fully decarbonise our power system by 2035 which requires an increase in onshore renewable generation, through solar and wind energy generation. Large-scale ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) in the UK has seen massive growth during 2021, with 500 solar farms currently in operation (SolarPanels Network, 2021), and a significant growth pipeline for a further 900 sites (SanDiego Green, 2021), with potential for significant ecological impacts. The 2017 Natural England Evidence review of the impact of solar farms on ecology concluded that future research needed to focus on the potential for such sites to support biodiversity (Natural England, 2017).

The Governments’ 25 Year Environment Plan (Defra, 2018) includes the aim of embedding ‘environmental net gain’ into developments, and creating or restoring 500,000 hectares of wildlife-rich habitat. The revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPFF) now requires planning to ‘identify and pursue opportunities for securing measurable net gains for biodiversity’ (NPPF, Para 174). This ‘net gain’ is largely achieved through the identification of impacts on habitats and species during surveys as part of the planning process, and the subsequent application of any required mitigation measures. Rarely do follow-up surveys take place to determine whether any impacts on biodiversity (positive or negative) have arisen as a consequence of the development.

Solar energy developments can cause impacts on biodiversity in various ways (Gasparatos et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2015; Pearce-Higgins et al., 2012), yet there is currently a lack of research evidence base for the impacts of ground-mounted photovoltaic solar panels on ecology (Taylor et al., 2019). Wind turbines have also been controversial in their ecological impacts (Wang et al., 2015), and the combined impact of solar and wind energy developments are particularly under-researched. There is a need for longitudinal research in collaboration with the renewable energy industry, to influence policy and planning decisions to not just limit negative impacts of this increase in the use of land for energy generation, but to add biodiversity ‘net gain.’

The Low Carbon Energy Generation park (LCEG) at Keele University provides a unique opportunity to address these needs, building on both the infrastructure developments and multi-sector collaborations that exist.

This project aims to:

• Establish a biodiversity baseline (vegetation, badgers, bats, birds, amphibians, small mammals, insects- especially pollinators) of the LCEG park at Keele University.
• Establish a baseline of soil health (chemistry and invertebrates) and explore the development of microhabitats above and below ground around the LCEG infrastructure.
• Develop a framework for long-term monitoring of biodiversity and soil health of the LCEG.
• Establish a multi-sector working group (including academic staff in GGE and LSC, Estates staff, and external advisors from Equans, SolarEnergyUK, Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, Lancaster University) to support future research development around best practice management and policy impact.
• Explore the potential for hosting industry training and dissemination events for managing biodiversity on solar/wind generation sites

The year 2022 presents a unique and important opportunity to establish a biodiversity baseline and establish a framework and process for long-term monitoring of the Keele University LCEG site, and provides the essential foundation for significant future funding applications and the opportunity to influence policy.

This project has additional benefits in diversifying the disciplinary engagement and research potential with the significant university investment into SEND and LCEG park. There are close synergies with the Zero Carbon Rugeley project, led by partners Equans, who have plans to develop a community-owned solar farm in Rugeley.

Project Lead: Dr Xuebing Cao, Keele Business School
Project Award: £11,480
Project Summary:

This project aims at facilitating the launch of the first ever Midlands Good Work Charter in 2022 and contributing towards a better understanding of good work initiative through knowledge exchange events and activities across the region. Following a successful 2021 policy research on decent work, the current project continues the collaboration with a key external partner ACAS (The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) to provide crucial support to the promotion of the Charter, which advocates inclusive post-Covid recovery and growth for the region in the context of the Government’s Levelling Up agenda. Supporting the Midlands Innovation, Keele Deal Recovery and Keele Deal Inclusion initiatives, the project will bring together government organisations, employers, trade unions, and universities within the region and beyond to facilitate the debates, dialogues and knowledge exchange on good work and employment. It will support a Charter launch event in May, the creation of a dedicated Charter website, and other related events and activities that will advance knowledge exchange on good work between policy making and implementation communities, businesses, civil society organisations and higher education institutions, improving the impact of Keele University’s public policy engagement. The outcome will include a report to government on good work policy measurement and recommendations, and academic output and disseminations. The project will have a major impact on developing a more coordinated employment policy framework to strengthen Midlands’ labour market, attract and retain the best talent, and create new opportunities for knowledge sharing and best practice at the workplace.

Project Lead: Dr Daniel Allen, School of School of Life Sciences
Project Award: £10,000
Project Summary:

Under UK law, pets are regarded as personal property when stolen. The sentences available under the Theft Act 1968 are dependent on the monetary value of the stolen animal, rather than their cultural, emotional, and social significance as family members (see for example Charles, 2016; Irvine and Cilia, 2017; Power, 2008; Shir-Vertesh, 2012). Recognising these tensions, Dr Daniel Allen created the evidence-based Pet Theft Reform campaign (in collaboration with the Stolen and Missing Pets Alliance) in 2018 to help facilitate public policy decision-making.

In this voluntary role, Dr Allen managed the campaign and research team, coordinated campaign strategy (including three 100,000 signature government petitions in his name), acted as a figurehead to help improve public understanding, lobbied MPs, and formed wider partnerships as part of the Pet Theft Reform Coalition. The creation of the Pet Theft Taskforce in May 2021 and publication of the ‘Pet Theft policy report’ in September 2021 (Dr Allen was invited to provide evidence and cited), led to the government announcement of a new ‘pet abduction’ offence which should become law in England and Wales in 2022.

GGE has identified the work surrounding the Pet Theft Reform campaign as an ‘Impact Case Study’ for the next REF. As well as exploring the various inequalities associated with sentient beings as property, the research considers wider implications for both humans and nonhuman animals in multi-species societies.

National policy change is expected in 2022. The ‘pet abduction’ offence will make a 5-year maximum sentence accessible for those who steal dogs, and recognise the emotional distress experienced by people and pets.

Further policy change is possible. The inequity for cats and other companion animals has been recognised by Defra and ‘the Government are currently considering this issue carefully’ (2022); politicians in Scotland and Northern Ireland are receptive to Pet Theft Reform. Extending the campaign to Ireland or beyond would lead to international impact.

QR Policy Support Funds would help this evidence-based campaign become increasingly influential. It is vital that current partnerships are strengthened – this will lead to increased knowledge exchange and access to wider funding opportunities. By building the ‘evidence base’ around pet theft, research outputs would not only inform national policy change, but also inform the development of organisational practices (partners; policing; veterinary; microchipping), which in turn will benefit public understanding and experiences.

Project Lead: Professor Bulent Gokay, School of Social Sciences
Project Award: £2,000
Project Summary:

Since the beginning of 2021, I've been busy bringing together a number of academic researchers, policy practitioners and community activists to design a large-scale research project on the above subject, with the intention of applying funding from Leverhulme Trust. As the first step of this work I met some of these people, and corresponded with all, and they all produced various articles and commentaries, which we published as a special issue of the Journal of Global Faultlines of which I am the Founding Editor. Now we would like to bring all together in Keele around a workshop to discuss this face to face and develop our initial work into a grant proposal. The funding is for covering the expense of this workshop, including some of the participants' travel to Keele.

Project Lead: Pawas Bisht, School of Humanities
Project Award: £14,807
Project Summary:

This is a proposal for a policy-related knowledge exchange and partnership building project involving Natural England and researchers based at Keele. The focus of this exchange will be on the contribution that participatory storytelling and arts approaches can make to the key aim of meaningfully engaging communities with the natural environment and facilitating inclusive and transformative processes of sustainable nature recovery. There is a clear and growing recognition, accentuated by the pandemic, of how engagement with nature makes a vital contribution to the health and well-being of the UK’s population (Geary et al.2021). At the same time, there is a vital need to address clear inequalities characterising such engagement on the part of socially deprived and excluded populations (Natural England MENE Survey Data 2009-2019). This is accompanied by the broader and urgent necessity of finding ways of deepening people’s connections with nature, enabling a cultural shift towards pro-environmental behaviours, and the process of nature recovery (Welden et.al 2021). Participatory storytelling and arts-based approaches can make a vital contribution to these aims (Datta 2018, Boykoff 2019); a significant cross-disciplinary cohort of Keele researchers has been working on investigating the potential of such approaches in local, national, and international contexts. Pawas Bisht (BA GCRF, 2021-23, ‘Storytelling for Environmental Change’), Ben Anderson, (AHRC 'Changing Landscapes' programme, 2020-22, 'Decommissioning the Twentieth Century' & 'Planning Creativity'), Lydia Martens (Leverhulme Fellowship 2022, ‘Storying Worlds Beyond Fish- Kinship and Connection in The Minch’) and Ceri Morgan (AHRC Leadership Fellowship 2021) are all engaged in significant externally funded research on this theme and have an established track-record of successful community-centred, creative, and collaborative knowledge-exchange on this subject (including key projects and partnerships showcased as part of Keele’s coCREATE network such as Seams, Tomorrow’s Garden, Feral Futures). The Keele team is therefore well-positioned to benefit from the proposed partnership with Natural England and make a strong policy-related contribution in embedding participatory storytelling approaches in nature recovery and human-nature reconnection processes.

Natural England is the government’s adviser for the natural environment, an executive non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Their mandate is to ‘help conserve, enhance and manage the natural environment for the benefit of present and future generations, thereby contributing to sustainable development’ (Natural England 2022). The agency directly manages several national nature reserves (NNRs) and works in partnership with other public bodies to oversee and administer national-level schemes and frameworks for the development and conservation of the natural environment. The agency is playing a key role in the implementation of the government’s aims for ‘building back greener’, through ‘building partnerships for nature’s recovery’ and by tackling barriers to people’s engagement, enjoyment and connection with nature (Natural England 2022). The proposed project jointly developed with Natural England seeks to:

1) develop a research and knowledge exchange partnership between Natural England and Bisht, Anderson, Morgan, and Martens;

2) provide opportunities for collaboratively developing knowledge and data from existing storytelling research into policy-oriented outputs and initiatives;

3) facilitate new and future pathways for impact on policies and practices in relation to embedding participatory storytelling and arts in processes of local nature recovery and sustainable development.

These aims will be delivered through two phases of collaborative co-production of policy-related insights and policy-relevant creative outputs.

Project Lead: Neil Heron, School of Medicine
Award Value: £20,000
Summary:

We recently published a scoping review of the concussion guidelines in amateur sport in the UK (www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/3/1072). This work highlighted the discrepancy between sports in concussion guidelines, which means that someone can be 'banned' from one sport due to a concussion but is eligible to still play in other sports. Thus the UK government needs to support the implementation of one concussion guideline across all amateur sports, with sports able to add nuances to these guidelines, e.g. in boxing, a concussion would have a longer return to play process than other sports. This guideline will be particularly helpful for parents in supporting their children when they experience a concussion and are perhaps involved in a number of different sports.

Project Lead: Elliott Lancaster, Keele Business School
Award Value: £1,263
Summary:

Chosen as a delegate for the UK at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Riyadh (25 March – 1 April 2022), after impressing the organising committee when co-opening Global Entrepreneurship Week (alongside Baroness Greenfield and Piers Linney). As part of the selected detail, I will be presenting research/policy recommendations alongside notable business leaders and government ministers/representatives, as part of the main event (27-30 March 2022). This will also be live-streamed for free to the whole Global Entrepreneurship Network, which includes representatives from over 130 countries.

Project Lead: Professor Zoe Robinson, School of School of Life Sciences
Project Award: £2,000
Project Summary:
Hydrogen is recognized as a central technological pillar of the UK’s decarbonization strategy featuring in the UK Government’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution (BEIS, 2020a), the Heat and Buildings Strategy (BEIS, 2021a), the Net Zero Research and Innovation Framework (BEIS, 2021b), and the recent Hydrogen Strategy (BEIS, 2021c). The Hydrogen Strategy further outlines the needs to understand and address critical end-user and consumer barriers to the use of hydrogen, and to secure the engagement and acceptance of consumers and civil society in the use of hydrogen, to enable hydrogen to become a “widely accepted” decarbonised energy source by the mid-2030s (BEIS, 2021c).

The HyDeploy programme is the UK’s first live demonstration of the distribution of blended hydrogen with natural gas to homes. The first live phase of the HyDeploy programme was at Keele University encompassing approximately 100 homes and 30 Faculty buildings between October 2019 and March 2021. Our research team examined consumer perceptions before and during the trial.

The second live phase of the HyDeploy programme began in August 2021 in part of Winlaton, a small town in Gateshead, in North East England, and the research team carried out perceptions research before the trial started. The area encompasses 668 homes and several small businesses and community facilities, and is a more typical residential area by UK standards. The Winlaton trial thus provides the important opportunity to understand how the results from the Keele study compare with a different and more typical UK residential demographic. Most existing research of consumer perceptions of hydrogen has taken a hypothetical scenario approach (e.g. BEIS, 2020b; Fylan et al., 2020; Scott and Powells, 2019), and has not been conducted with those who are currently (or are about to) experience hydrogen in the home or their local context. Our research team is thus producing some of the world’s first consumer-focused place-based research into public acceptance of hydrogen as a domestic fuel.

Our recent research highlighted key differences between the Keele and Winlaton’s resident perceptions. Studying the perceptions of consumers affected by the HyDeploy trial provides a unique opportunity to develop understanding as to the likely public acceptance of hydrogen in the home as part of a net zero transition, and can help inform communication and engagement approaches to support future place-based hydrogen projects and use key learnings for the successful rollout of other sustainable energy technologies across the UK.

As the Winlaton trial is due to end in June/July 2022, the research is time-critical. This proposal seeks funding to carry out a final phase of research into consumer perceptions associated with the domestic hydrogen blending HyDeploy trials. Funding is sought to carry out a door-to-door survey and focus groups with the residents of Winlaton who have been receiving hydrogen-blended gas since August 2021. This is a crucial phase of research, providing comparison to the end-of trial research at Keele University, and a comparison to the perceptions of customers on the Winlaton HyDeploy network before the trial started. More importantly, this provides the first opportunity in the UK to understand how the public have found the experience of having blended hydrogen in the home. These findings will be of significant interest to policy-makers and industry as they develop plans and communication around future hydrogen use in domestic settings (including proposed hydrogen village trials).