The Inquiry into the skills capacity within local government to deliver sustainable communities (planning skills)

Memorandum by Centre for Education in the Built Environment (CEBE)

 

Submitted by Professor Chris Webster BSc DipTP MSc PhD DSc(Econ), Director of the Centre for Education in the Built Environment, Professor of Urban Planning and Development, Cardiff University.

CEBE is one of the Higher Education Academy's 24 Subject Centres funded by the Higher Education Funding Councils. Its mandate is to work with academics, universities and their departments to improve the student learning experience in Built Environment higher education subjects - including the professional subjects crucial to sustainable community building: architecture, construction management, housing, landscape, planning, property, surveying and transport. CEBE is hosted by Cardiff University and Salford University. It runs a programme of events, publications, networks and research with a view to discovering, brokering and disseminating good and innovative practice in teaching and learning in these subjects. See http://www.cebe.heacademy.ac.uk/

Over the years CEBE has been active in brokering better links between academics and practitioners/employers. In the planning field regular events have been run in collaboration with the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and CHOPS (Conference of Heads of Planning Schools). The most recent of these, held Jan 15^th 2008 was a workshop entitled: Improving the transition from Planning Education to Planning Practice, bringing together some 50 delegates, the majority being employers/ planning practitioners, to discuss the planning skills gap, particularly the mismatch of skills demanded by employers and those obtained by graduates of planning programmes through their educational experience.

The full report from this meeting, prepared by independent consultant Ian Cooper, has yet to be signed off by the sponsoring organisations. But the headline findings are of relevance to this Inquiry and reflect the broader picture emerging from CEBE's engagements with employers about graduate skills and curriculum content. These are summarised below, followed by some conclusions and an agenda for action.

 

1. Summary of findings from the workshop: Improving the transition from Planning Education to Planning Practice, held at London South Bank University January 15^th 2008

 

Aim of workshop: to provide a forum for the academic community and planning practitioner colleagues to discuss planning education and the transition from education into practice. The workshop explored the structure and delivery of planning education and discussed the requirements of practice and practitioners who invest in the education and training of graduates.

 

Method: participants worked in six mixed groups, which were asked to discuss:

§ What can and cannot be learnt 'on the job':

o by those who have followed a 48 month undergraduate course in planning

o by those who have undertaken a 12 or 24 month postgraduate course in planning?

§ What are the key action for curricular change in:

o initial planning education

o RTPI's APC (Assessment of Professional Competence), and

o CPD/lifelong learning.

 

Selected results:

Participants were asked to provide both individual and shared group responses to the above questions. The group responses reported at the workshop suggests a degree of agreement about:

§ what can and cannot be learnt on the job, and

§ the key actions required for change in initial education, APC and CPD/lifelong learning.

 

There was some agreement that:

§ the local and political context in which planning occurs

§ the internal context and culture of organizations where planners work

§ customer-handling skills, and

§ the specifics of a planner's role

can only be learnt on the job.

 

There was also some agreement that:

§ critical thinking and analytical skills

§ the legal and policy background of planning

§ ethical frameworks and values, and

§ social dimensions of planning and planning theory

cannot only be learnt on the job - i.e. these should be the subject of study at university.

 

To bring about the changes required for the necessary development of skills and competences in initial education, there was a degree of consensus that:

§ universities should develop better relations with practitioners, with more employer engagement

§ there should be more work experience and placements for students, and

§ there should be more use of 'real/live' projects.

 

A full analysis of group and individual responses will be published in the report of the workshop - accessible via CEBE's web site from the Second week in March 2008.

 

Commentary

The results of the workshop discussion show a degree of continuity with previous policy statements and recent meetings about planning education. They share, for instance, the RTPI's emphasis on stakeholder engagement and professional involvement in planning schools stated in its 2004 Policy Statement on Planning Education, www.rtpi.org.uk/download/237/Policy-Statement-on-Initial-Planning-Education.pdf. And they continue the dialogue about 'practitioner involvement in course delivery' arising from the Discussion on Planning Education and Development of Graduate Planners, held in Edinburgh in May 2007. And they reiterate the need for 'leadership' called for at the event organised by CEBE with the RTPI and CHOPS (Council of Heads of Planning Schools) in October 2006, http://cebe.ac.uk/news/past_events/planning_education/index.php.

But they also reveal absences and discontinuities too. What is perhaps surprising is the lack of specific reference by participants to 'spatial planning' and 'place making', twin strands of the RTPI's rebranding and its New Vision for Planning (www.rtpi.org.uk/download/245/RTPI-New-Vision-for-Planning.pdf and www.rtpi.org.uk/item/281/).

 

The workshop discussions - and previous similar discussion facilitated by CEBE - show that there are widespread concerns amongst planners about the current state of the transition between education and practice. Reflections on these concerns differs across the public and private sectors and between higher education and practice. These concerns have yet to coalesce into a coherent and shared programme for change.

 

From the evidence available to it, CEBE would have to conclude that there needs to be some strategic decisions taken by university planning schools to engage with the changing nature of planning practice. Universities constantly adapt themselves but the labour market signals are not always very clear. There are many other influences that shape curricula, such as the research interests of staff and university missions.

 

CEBE believes that planning is a vital social function, the importance of which will not diminish. However, the demand for planning -the specific and varied roles that it performs - have changed significantly in the last 30 years and are under constant review. This is a challenge for planning schools - as with all vocational subjects taught in universities. Curricula are generally not subject to a great degree of central direction. They are strongly shaped by the staff who are appointed. This can lead to inertia and divergence between the preoccupations, knowledge, ethos and priorities of academics and practitioners. This theme is elaborated in two recent CEBE editorials:

Webster CJ (2007) Successful Professional Action and the Rules of Learning. Editorial, CEBE Transactions 4(1) pp 1-7: http://www.cebe.heacademy.ac.uk/transactions/volumes_index.php?edition=4.1

and Webster CJ (2006) Practice-bounded Knowledge, Editorial, CEBE Transactions 3(2) pp 1-8:

http://www.cebe.heacademy.ac.uk/transactions/volumes_index.php?edition=3.2

 

There can be no such thing as 'pure' planning education. While much useful knowledge might be gained from studying relatively abstract urban theories, it would seem to serve no-one's interests to perpetuate curricula that do not in the end deliver useful knowledge. The distinction between delivering education and delivering skills has probably been overplayed in planning schools. There needs to be a renewed debate about what 'graduateness' means in planning and how knowledge maps to skills. The recent revised Benchmark Statement for Planning:

 

http://www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/statements/drafts/TownandCountry07.asp,

 

which CEBE organised in partnership with the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is a start, as is the RTPI's 2004 Policy Statement on Planning Education:

 

www.rtpi.org.uk/download/237/Policy-Statement-on-Initial-Planning-Education.pdf.

 

However, these are intended to offer detailed guidance on knowledge components of curricula. They are perhaps not so useful for helping schools make bold decisions about teaching and learning strategies. On the basis of evidence accumulated by CEBE in its many and varied engagements with academics and planning professionals, it would seem that planning schools need to:

 

1. Upgrade the teaching of certain generic skills required to deliver effective place-making: including project management, financial evaluation and communication skills

2. Be aware of, if not resolve, a tension between a typically public-sector planning ethos in university planning curricula and an increasingly private sector ethos in the profession

3. Understand that planning skills will be sourced where they are best supplied and that the traditional university centres of planning education are in competition with other providers - for example surveying and architecture schools

4. Place project work, preferably live project work, much more centrally in the curriculum

5. Develop more effective links with practice - especially perhaps via part time professional tutors and visiting lecturers (although this poses its own challenges in terms of teaching quality and budgets)

6. Upgrade the communication skills of students. Employers in nearly all fields complain about the poor quality of written communication skills in graduates these days. Planning students in the UK no longer tend to be taught graphic communication skills as their 'natural language' - in the way the architects are, for example - and they are doubly disadvantaged as a result. Add to this the undeniable decline in the numerical communication skills of social science graduates including planning graduates (telling a story through statistics and charts for example) and there is a serious communication agenda to be addressed.

7. Review the knowledge base supplied to planning students. The extent of relevant knowledge is literally unbounded. This means that knowledge has to be sampled. The way this occurs often leaves students of cross-disciplinary subjects like planning without a clear sense of disciplinary identity and without intellectual integrity and fluency. There needs to be renewed discussion of the alternative approaches to developing graduates who have intellectual confidence. Without this, it is difficult to be creative.

8. Review the methods used to engender creativity in students. For decades, planning schools were the principal suppliers of trainees entering the UK's administrative planning system. This inevitably had an effect on curricula. As academic planning became a socio-economic policy science so it became less of an art. There is now a greater need than ever to marry policy analysis skills with creative skills. Vibrant and sustainable communities are created with a good deal of vision and entrepreneurship. At the same time, analytical skills are at a premium because of the ever greater need to evaluate impacts (of plans, individual development proposals etc) systematically.

9. Review the approaches used to develop entrepreneurial skills and the knowledge and values that underpin them. Elsewhere the kind of activities planners engage in are termed social entrepreneurism: seeking win-win gains in multi-lateral transactions involving private interests transacting over land and buildings and third party interests. Planning schools need to give their graduates greater entrepreneurial skills or at least prepare them better to develop such skills.

10. Examine the scope for inter- and multi-disciplinary learning experiences. Important planning knowledge and skills, particularly those relating to the entrepreneurial place-making role of planners, can arguably only be learnt with confidence in the context of multi-profession team situations

11. Review the scope for 'live' learning experiences in curricula. Multi-disciplinary team work can happen by simulation, by collaboration across university departments and in the field, via live projects with real clients.

12. Review the scope for more problem-based learning. This is one way of developing greater creativity in planning students, but has many other benefits. Although the cause of problem based learning has undoubtedly been overdone by some enthusiasts, there is a strong prima facie case that graduates on vocational degree programmes should spend at least some of their time at university learning through problem solving. This is not the same as project based learning. Problem based learning gives students a problem and asks them to discover what knowledge is useful in solving it.

13. Review the scope for mapping the typically strong academic scholarship of environmental issues now found in planning schools to the new skill base of planning practice, especially environmental evaluation procedures.

14. Review the significance of a shift to 'spatial planning' as a disciplinary focus. For example, in many schools the very considerable insights from 100 years or more of spatial analysis (analytical economic geography) and the offerings from the new field of geographical economics are no longer on the curriculum. There is spatial planning without spatial analysis - a quite unsatisfcatory position.

 

This is a challenging agenda for planning schools. Many schools and many individual academics are on the case. There are some excellent examples of innovative teaching and learning and of curricula restructured to face these challenges. But the results of CEBE's brokerage between academia and practice over recent years suggests that some of these matters need to be the subject of more frank reflection, discussion and action. Organisations like CEBE, the Academy for Sustainable Communities, the Royal Town Planning Institute and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors can play a part in guiding, encouraging, incentivising and facilitating change in planning schools. Leadership is needed however. The Conference of Heads of Planning Schools would be a natural place to look for this.