Evaluation Summary Report (ESR)

The Evaluation Summary Report is the written feedback: your score on each criterion and the experts' comments, organised as strengths and weaknesses. It normally arrives within about five months of the deadline, alongside the decision.

Read the weaknesses as instructions rather than opinions. Each one exists because an evaluator had to justify a deduction, so each corresponds to something a reader could not find, could not follow, or did not believe. Even comments that seem to misread the proposal are useful: if three independent experts misread the same passage, the passage is the problem.

The scores tell you where the work is. A weak Impact score with strong Excellence means the science is accepted and the argument for who benefits is not, a rewrite of one section rather than a new project. Uniformly middling scores usually mean the fit to the topic was wrong, which is the expensive diagnosis.

There is no appeal against scientific judgement. A redress procedure exists for PROCEDURAL failures (a conflict of interest, a criterion evaluated that was not in the call, a manifest error in handling) and it runs on a short deadline stated in the letter. Redress does not re-evaluate the proposal on its merits, and requests that amount to disagreeing with the experts are rejected.

Keep the ESRs. Across several submissions they show a pattern, and the pattern is usually more informative than any single report. Most organisations discover from them that they are consistently strong on one criterion and consistently weak on another.