Royal Society Partnership Grants
Royal Society grants offer up to £3,000 for UK schools to run new STEM research projects with experts
The Royal Society Partnership Grants scheme funds UK schools and colleges up to £3,000 to work in partnership with STEM professionals from academia or industry to run an investigative STEM project. The Faculty of Life Sciences is keen to partner with any interested schools to support applications.
The project criteria include:
- You must apply with a specific research project, not experiments for a STEM club.
- The project must be a new initiative for the school.
- The title of the project must be a STEM-related question that the students are attempting to answer by completing their hands-on, practical research.
- If your project includes a 'design and build' aspect (for example, building a car, robots, weather station, etc), there must still be a clear investigative element.
- The project needs to last a minimum of one full term. The maximum duration is six terms (across two years).
- For Partnership Grants, the students are the researchers. Therefore, you should aim to limit investigations where the students are also the subjects. Projects investigating wellbeing and/or mental health are ineligible due to the sensitive nature of these topics.
We have prepared a list of suggested projects which you can view here; we are also happy to work with you to develop something suitable for your school's needs - just get in touch!
There are three application deadlines in 2026: 30 April; 10 July; 30 November.
You can read more about the application process on the Royal Society website. Public engagement staff at the Faculty of Life Sciences are on hand to support you in the application process.
If you would like to read about an example of a successful and long-running collaboration funded by the RS Partnerships Grant, you can check out The Daffodil Project, which involves schools across Scotland as well as scientists from the University of Dundee and the James Hutton Institute.