| StorageSite | UCL Institute of Education |
| Description | Papers regarding reviews of the National Survey of Health and Development (NSHD), carried out by the Medical Research Council (MRC).
In 1962 the MRC began providing core funding for the NSHD. From then on it has carried out reviews of the study roughly every 5 years (as all MRC units are reviewed), and so they have become known as ‘quinquennial reviews’ or ‘QQRs’. The MRC's core funding covered the costs of salaries, accommodation, travel and subsistence, temporary clerical assistance, and sometimes specific data collections.
The reviews typically involved the production of a progress report by the NSHD, then the NSHD would be visited by a sub-committee from the MRC who would produce a report, and then the outcome of the review would be decided at an MRC board meeting.
At some points the NSHD was housed within an MRC unit, and so it was the whole unit that was reviewed. At other times the NSHD was not housed within a unit, and the NSHD team had the status of ‘External Scientific Staff’.
There wasn’t a traditional QQR in 2007 because a new MRC unit was in the process of being set up (the MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing), and so instead of a QQR in 2007 it was more of a strategic review, which produced the planning documents at NSHD/4/13-16 in this archive. |