United Kingdom

The single supervisor model was dominant from the inception of the PhD in the UK in 1917 to the 1980s. But then, a series of developments led to the widespread introduction of team supervision in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter seeks to (1) outline these developments in the context of the emergence of a national framework for team supervision, (2) consider how institutions have implemented that framework, and (3) look at evidence of its effectiveness from the perspectives of supervisors and candidates. The main conclusion is that while team supervision is formally the norm in the UK, sole supervision may still be prevalent and operating under the radar.