Last week we received an email from Professor Alison Park, the ESRC interim executive chair, saying:

“As you know, Leicester used part of their [ESRC] IAA funding to support the development of the training package that you have flagged. The funding for this activity ended at the end of 2021 and no IAA funding is being used in any further development of the toolkit. Their website provides details about their work and current training offer”

This is extremely good news – especially because until very recently the Leicester “student sex work” project’s webpages stated that they had secured ESRC funding until the end of 2023.

Furthermore the training that is offered to university staff and students is no longer being offered free of charge and participants must now pay to attend – and the updated toolkit, which we wrote about in our last update, has also been removed from the project web pages.

We do not know what is behind these developments, but we suspect that the support for this petition has been a factor at least.

Professor Park offered no explanation for why the funding ended so much earlier than previously stated on the project’s webpages. We are writing to ask for further explanation.

For further information, see our new article, which is linked below.

Thank you for your continued support.