There is not a business school dean anywhere in the world who does not complain about the problem of attracting and retaining good faculty, and the UK is no exception with around 40 per cent of faculty set to to retire in the next 15 years.

With this in mind the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), one of the UK government’s research councils, has teamed up with the Society for the Advancement of Management Studies, a charitable trust, to finance a fellowship scheme in which appropriate early or mid-career individuals with good undergraduate degrees will be able get a foot in the door of academia. The move is particularly timely as some of the UK’s top finance brains look for new jobs following redundancies in the City of London.