Suggestions from the consultation are to:

• Retain commitment to quality, impact and independence: our strategic priorities individually and collectively should highlight excellence with impact; encourage challenges to conventional wisdom and taken-for-granted assumptions.
• Tackle deep difficult issues: social science can make a vital contribution under these headings, often using new methods and resources. The ESRC is the leader of UK social science both in an increasingly international context and in partnership with other Research Councils.
• Exploit existing resources: we need to connect the three strategic priorities around such themes as inequalities of power, wealth and income, and environmental resources and change. They will come together in social science contributions to Research Councils UK (RCUK) challenges.
• Exploit datasets effectively: especially the ESRC's and other government agencies' longitudinal surveys.
• The potential of synthetic reviews and think pieces as delivery mechanisms: making the best use of available evidence.
• Enhance international opportunities: our strategic priorities are international in scope, which means we will be thinking about new ways to 'co-produce' knowledge, theory and method with overseas partners, for example in comparative longitudinal research and area studies.
• Avoid disciplinary capture: we need to avoid individual disciplines capturing topics and fostering linkages between different social sciences (and other disciplines funded by the RCUK).
• Join up ESRC activities to enhance impact: we get more value for money and more intellectual pay-off by emphasising how knowledge, new and old, can be joined up.

Some common misconceptions:

The priorities are Not:

• A list of new research programmes
• A steer to how research grants will be made – the ESRC remains committed to a vibrant, innovative 'response mode'
• Narrowly UK-centric
• Based on a restrictive agenda for applied social science
• All about research - as also underpinning data resources and capacity building activities
  
• Everything we do