UKRI What Works Innovation Fellowships — Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls 2026: Three 18-Month Fellowships Worth Up to £220,000 Full Economic Cost, Embedded Inside Government-Backed What Works Centres

UKRI What Works Innovation Fellowships — Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls 2026: Three 18-Month Fellowships Worth Up to £220,000 Full Economic Cost, Embedded Inside Government-Backed What Works Centres

Most research fellowships hand you money and leave you where you already are. This one moves you. UK Research and Innovation is funding three What Works Innovation Fellowships that place researchers inside the organisations that decide what English and Welsh public services actually do about violence against women and girls — Foundations, the College of Policing’s What Works Centre for Crime Reduction, and the Youth Endowment Fund. You keep your academic employment and your UKRI grant. You spend 18 months working where the evidence gets commissioned, appraised, and turned into practice guidance.

The fellowships are funded through UKRI’s Research & Development Missions Accelerator Programme, which sits behind the government’s Safer Streets mission and its target of halving violence against women and girls within a decade. Applications close at 16:00 on Tuesday 8 September 2026. Interviews are expected in the week commencing 28 September 2026, and the fellowships start on 4 January 2027.

Key details at a glance

What the money actually covers

The funding model here is a UKRI grant, not a salary offer, and that distinction shapes how you should plan the application. Per the fellowship documentation, the full economic cost of your project can be up to £220,000, which is inclusive of an additional £40,000 budget for research and collaboration costs. UKRI funds 80% of FEC, with the balance met by your employing organisation in the normal way for UK research council awards.

Practically, that splits into two pots that behave differently:

• The fellowship position itself, covering your time across the 18 months. Because the scheme is open to all career stages, the same headline figure has to stretch across very different salary points. A senior academic will likely need to cost a lower FTE fraction than an early-career researcher to fit within the envelope. Work this out with your research office before you write your statement, because the fraction of your time you can afford shapes what you can credibly promise to deliver.
• The £40,000 research and collaboration budget, which is what makes this more than a secondment. It can support the primary and secondary data work, convening, travel to host and partner sites, and collaborative activity across the fellow cohort that the fellowship is designed around.

Do not treat the £40,000 as a contingency line. Reviewers for embedded fellowships tend to read an unspent or vaguely specified research budget as a sign the applicant has not thought concretely about what they will produce.

The three fellowships, and how to choose between them

You apply to a specific fellowship, through a specific host, and the fellowship descriptions differ enough that a generic application will read badly to at least two of the three panels. Consult the individual fellowship descriptions before deciding.

1. What Works to prevent VAWG perpetration — Youth Endowment Fund. This fellowship supports YEF in building the evidence on what prevents VAWG perpetration among young people, as part of YEF’s broader mission on children and young people’s involvement in violence. The work could include leading research projects to fill evidence gaps — with a stated particular interest in online harms and tech-facilitated VAWG affecting young people — working with YEF’s Data and Insight team on the annual Child Vulnerability and Violence survey, supporting the Toolkit team’s reviews of prevention approaches, reviewing VAWG prevention practice across England and Wales to inform programme development and evaluation design, and managing or supporting forthcoming YEF-commissioned secondary data analysis projects. Named disciplines: criminology and law, gender studies, behavioural science, psychology, public policy, economics, epidemiology, public health, and data science. Location is London (hybrid).

2. What Works in tackling domestic abuse — Foundations (What Works Centre for Children & Families). This fellowship leads Foundations’ input into the national programme and researches and designs solutions to improve how local authorities use evidence on identifying and supporting children and young people affected by domestic abuse. Named disciplines: social science, gender studies, psychology, public health, social policy evaluation, behavioural science, data science, applied research ethics, and related fields. Apply via Foundations.

3. Economic modelling to support effective prevention — College of Policing (What Works Centre for Crime Reduction). The fellow leads a programme of economic modelling on interventions designed to prevent domestic abuse perpetration, so that decisions about when and where to invest can be evidence-informed. Named disciplines: economics, econometrics, decision sciences, public policy, criminology, and data science/statistics. Apply via the College of Policing.

All three carry the same policy topic — Safer Streets: Reducing Violence Against Women and Girls — and all three are open to applicants at any career stage.

The choice should turn on where your method meets their problem. If your strongest asset is quantitative valuation of interventions, the College of Policing fellowship is the honest fit and the other two are a stretch. If you work on adolescent development, online harms, or survey methodology, YEF. If your track record is in children’s social care systems and local authority evidence use, Foundations. Applying to the fellowship whose named disciplines list your field is not sufficient — those lists are broad by design — but applying to one where they don’t is close to disqualifying.

Who is eligible

The eligibility rules are compact but each one is load-bearing:

• You must be based at a UK employing organisation eligible for UKRI funding. This is the constraint that catches the most people. UKRI publishes an eligibility checker; use it early, because it covers higher education institutions, research institutes, and certain other organisations, and independent researchers without an eligible host cannot apply.
• You must hold a PhD or be able to demonstrate equivalent research experience. The “or equivalent” is genuine and matters for applicants from government analysis, evaluation consultancies, or the VAWG sector — but the burden is on you to evidence a comparable research record, not to assert it.
• You need relevant subject matter or methodological expertise for the fellowship you are applying to.
• You must be able to undertake an 18-month fellowship beginning 4 January 2027.
• All career stages are welcome. This is unusual and worth taking at face value: it is not a disguised early-career scheme, nor a disguised professorial one.

Beyond formal eligibility, the calls describe the working profile the hosts want: someone who can work effectively within a team toward shared objectives, and who can communicate complex information accessibly. These are not filler. An embedded fellow who cannot explain a difference-in-differences result to a policing practitioner in two minutes will struggle regardless of publication record.

Application materials and process

For the Youth Endowment Fellowship, you submit two documents through the YEF careers page — a CV of no more than three pages and an Application Statement of no more than three pages, six pages total. The statement must answer three questions:

1. Vision — what are you hoping to achieve with your proposed fellowship?
2. Applicant capability to deliver — why are you the right individual to deliver the objectives of this fellowship, with reference to the fellowship requirements?
3. Approach — how will you approach the co-design of the fellowship with your host What Works Centre?

The Foundations and College of Policing fellowships are applied for through those organisations directly; check each host’s page for its own submission route and any variation in required materials.

Three pages for a vision, a capability case, and a co-design approach is tight. That is deliberate. Budget roughly a page each and resist the urge to open with a literature review — the panel knows the literature; they are assessing whether you can convert it into something a What Works Centre can use.

How to prepare a competitive application

Answer the co-design question properly. Of the three questions, this is where most applications will be thin, and it is the one that distinguishes an embedded fellowship from a normal grant. The hosts are explicitly saying the fellowship will be shaped jointly. A strong answer describes how you would spend the first weeks — which teams you would sit with, which existing workstreams you would map, how you would negotiate scope changes when the host’s priorities shift mid-fellowship — and shows you understand that arriving with a fully specified, immovable project is the failure mode, not the goal.

Write for a mixed panel. These centres employ analysts, practitioners, and policy staff alongside researchers. Statistical sophistication earns you nothing if the reader cannot see the decision it improves.

Ground the vision in the host’s actual outputs. For YEF, that means the Toolkit, the Children, Violence and Vulnerability survey, and the evidence and gap maps — all public. For Foundations, its domestic abuse priority area and its practice guidance for children’s social care. For the College of Policing, its crime reduction toolkit and existing economic analysis. Naming a specific gap in a specific published output, and proposing what would close it, is worth more than any amount of general enthusiasm about the mission.

Engage your research office now, not in the last week. An FEC costing at 80% recovery, with a defined non-staff budget, needs institutional sign-off. Late August is not the time to discover your organisation’s internal deadline was a fortnight earlier.

Take the national programme seriously. Every fellow is expected to help launch a National What Works Programme on VAWG, working with the other fellows and with organisations including the Cabinet Office, UKRI, VAWG sector support services, universities, and other What Works Centres. Fellows will be supported to spend dedicated time on this — including with the Cabinet Office Evaluation Task Force and the R&D Missions Accelerator Programme’s VAWG Challenge. If your application reads as though you plan to do your own project and treat the cohort work as an interruption, that is visible.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Assuming eligibility. Check the UKRI employing-organisation list before you write a word.
• Applying to the wrong host. A domestic abuse systems researcher applying to the economic modelling fellowship will not be reallocated; they will be rejected.
• Overpromising against the budget. A programme of work that plausibly needs three years and £600,000 does not become fundable by being described in 18-month language.
• Neglecting the survivor and practitioner perspective. This is a field where research ethics, safeguarding, and the involvement of people with lived experience are not optional add-ons. Applied research ethics is explicitly named among the relevant disciplines for the Foundations fellowship.
• Treating “all career stages” as a reason to be vague about your level. Be explicit about the FTE you are costing and why that fraction is enough to deliver what you promise.
• Missing the hard time. The deadline is 16:00 on 8 September 2026, not end of day.

Timeline

Frequently asked questions

Can I apply to more than one of the three fellowships? The call does not state a restriction, but the three descriptions are distinct enough that a serious application to one is substantially different from a serious application to another. If you are considering two, contact the relevant hosts first and be prepared to write genuinely different statements.

Is this a job or a grant? Functionally it is a UKRI-funded fellowship held at your UK employing organisation, with time embedded in the host What Works Centre. That is why employer eligibility, FEC costing, and the 80% funding rate all apply.

Do I have to relocate? The Youth Endowment Fund fellowship is London-based and hybrid. Check the other two hosts’ listings for their arrangements, which are not confirmed here.

Does the £220,000 include the research budget? Yes. The figure is a full-economic-cost ceiling inclusive of the £40,000 research and collaboration allocation.

Am I eligible without a PhD? Potentially — the call accepts equivalent research experience. You will need to make that case explicitly and evidentially in your CV and statement rather than leaving the panel to infer it.

What if I have questions about the YEF fellowship specifically? Email [email protected]. For the other two fellowships, use the contact routes on the Foundations and College of Policing pages.

Official links and next steps

• Youth Endowment Fund fellowship page (application route for the VAWG perpetration prevention fellowship, and the fullest public overview of all three): youthendowmentfund.org.uk/careers/ukri-what-works-innovation-fellowship-what-works-to-prevent-vawg-perpetration
• Foundations (What Works Centre for Children & Families) — apply here for the domestic abuse fellowship, via the link on the YEF page
• College of Policing (What Works Centre for Crime Reduction) — apply here for the economic modelling fellowship, via the link on the YEF page
• UKRI R&D Missions Accelerator Programme: ukri.org/what-we-do/browse-our-areas-of-investment-and-support/rd-missions-accelerator-programme/
• UKRI eligibility checker for employing organisations: ukri.org/apply-for-funding/before-you-apply/find-out-if-you-can-apply-for-funding/

At the time of writing, UKRI has not published a standalone opportunity page for this call on ukri.org; the host What Works Centres are the official application routes, and the downloadable fellowship descriptions on the YEF page are the authoritative documents for each role. Confirm figures, dates, and submission requirements against those documents before applying, and verify your institution’s internal deadline — which will be earlier than 8 September.

If you work on violence prevention and have ever watched a good study land nowhere, this is the rare fellowship built to fix exactly that gap. Three people will get it. The application is six pages.