Meeting of minds

Mark Lupton, Regeneration & Renewal, 27 October 2006

Go into any school, college or university and ask the students: 'What do you want to do,'" says Jon Ladd, chief executive of the British Urban Regeneration Association (Bura), "and I can guarantee no-one would say they want to be a regeneration practitioner."

This is a view with which most of those working in the sector - especially those trying to bridge its now widely-recognised skills gap - would probably agree. Some young people, most likely, will say they aspire to be architects or surveyors, but few would identify a career in regeneration as a goal.

However, that does not mean that those working to turn the situation around see no grounds for optimism. In fact, a straw poll carried out for this article among most of the key organisations involved in skills development in regeneration came back with an overwhelmingly consistent response. We are in a better position now than we were 12 months ago, they said, although there is still a lot more to do.

Last year, the shadow of the Egan report still loomed large over the myriad professions that fall under the regeneration umbrella. Published in 2004 by Sir John Egan, Skills for Sustainable Communities painted a picture of a sector dogged by a lack of cooperation between those with similar ultimate goals, but differing job titles. The professions were still stuck in their silos, the report concluded - to the surprise of no-one. What Egan called "generic" skills, such as community engagement, partnership working, project management and leadership, were in short supply. There was a call for cross-occupational learning, in which all the professional institutes, regeneration agencies, colleges and universities had a part to play. Progress might be difficult, but at least the problem had been identified.

At the Bura conference in July where the regenerator workforce campaign was launched there was at least one encouraging sign of a move out of the silos. The campaign saw eight professional institutes sign a memorandum of understanding to work together on continuing professional development (CPD) programmes.The bodies involved are the Royal Institute of British Architects, Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Landscape Institute, Institute of Civil Engineers, Institution of Economic Development, Construction Industry Council and Urban Design Group. Unsurprisingly, this hardly made front-page news, but Phil Barton, director of the North-West's Regional Centre of Excellence (RCE), says this commitment would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

"It's a very positive thing," he says. "It commits them to trying to ensure that their members have access to support for CPD and to opening up their CPD to members of other institutes. It's a move towards the goal of pan-professional CPD.

"When I arrived two years ago, it wouldn't have been possible. It's been brought about by a combination of a government push nationally with the creation of the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC), and RCEs' work in the regions."

Barton also points to the fact that every region, apart from London, now has set up an RCE: the bodies which regional development agencies (RDAs) were charged with setting up in 1999 to deliver specialist regeneration skills training and advice. London is in the process of launching an agency similar to an RCE that is named Design for London.

The RCEs also seem to have started to find their role in relation to the emerging ASC - which itself has been finding its feet since the announcement of its creation by deputy prime minister John Prescott at the Sustainable Communities Summit in Manchester early last year.

Two-way relationship

When the academy first burst onto the scene, there were concerns that the RCEs were being pushed out of the picture. But commentators on both sides now argue that things have settled down, a relationship is being forged between agencies, and there is a constructive recognition that the national and regional bodies have different roles to play.

Jill Riley, the ASC's director of policy and liaison, says: "We're realising increasingly that our role is about maximising the contributions of other people; we are the glue that holds it all together rather than delivering the training and education ourselves."
Over the past year, the academy has created a business plan, recruited a team of staff and carried out research to establish what needs doing.

Meanwhile, the RCEs have carried out a number of studies on behalf of the academy to assess what skills are needed locally and where priorities should lie. To nobody's great surprise, the conclusions reached from this research have reiterated that more collaborative working across professions and better community engagement skills are needed.

In the most concrete example of RCE/ASC cooperation, learning laboratories are to be established on behalf of the academy in each of the RCE areas. Each will cover the skills gaps and needs of a particular regeneration programme -  such as the housing market renewal programme Elevate East Lancashire - and will then work with local learning providers to establish what is needed to tackle the problems.

The academy has also been carrying out some collaborative work, the most high profile element of which was a joint commitment to work alongside the Chartered Institute of Housing on cross-sector learning. Talks with professional bodies such as the RTPI, RICS and the Landscape Institute are set to follow, says Riley, and will have similar aims.

This adds up to several steps in the right direction, says Neil McInroy, head of think-tank the Centre for Local and Economic Strategies, who has been monitoring closely the work of the RCEs and the academy. Initially, he admits, he was sceptical. But his opinions are changing.

"The academy has 22 staff and a business plan which seems to stack up and be doing things. It's making international connections and it's rightly prioritising how to attract young people," he says. "The RCEs are doing some great work - just go on to their websites and every few weeks there are events, regeneration placements, mentoring schemes, masterclasses and workshops."

"The academy seems to have established more of a research, intelligence-gathering bent for itself, [looking at] the needs, wants and desires around skills. The RCEs seem to have found a focus in delivering on the ground."

But with the academy currently guaranteed funding only until March 2008, things will have to start moving quickly, argues McInroy. "It has a lot of targets it wants to meet," he says. "It seems a dreadfully short timescale."

There have been other developments for the regeneration skills agenda. The Government's regeneration agency English Partnerships has spent the past year nurturing its new graduate programme - the first 12 participants are now more than half way through their 24-month course.The next intake has been recruited and started in September, when recruitment for those starting in 2007 also began.

"It's been going exceptionally well," says Pam Lewis, head of people development at English Partnerships."It's more than met our expectations. The individuals have performed exceptionally well; they've gone on placements to the Housing Corporation and RDAs, and we've had nothing but positive responses from those organisations."

Strategic approach

This year, English Partnerships has also written its first career development strategy for those in the organisation, and it is expanding its "excellence in leadership" programme from January to boost generic skills among middle as well as senior management.

Meanwhile, at the RTPI, initiatives to boost skills within the profession have been launched in the past year. Partnership boards within accredited university departments have been created consisting of representatives of the RTPI, practitioners, department staff and other representatives of the university. In order to ensure that students are dealing with up-to-date issues, the board meets at least once a year to scrutinise courses. This replaces the previous system where the RTPI would only review courses every five years. The institute has also introduced the Assessment of Professional Competence (APC) for recent graduates. Effectively a graduate development programme, the APC engages with young planners so that they understand early on what they need to do to qualify for corporate membership of the RTPI.

The first qualified planners are starting to come through from the new fast track MAs in planning, says Sue Percy, the RTPI's director of education and lifelong learning. "The problem is that demand [for planners] has also gone up, because of things like the Olympic Games. So we still have a shortfall, particularly in London and the South-East. Of course, for those already in the profession it means there are a lot of job opportunities and opportunities for career advancement."

Certainly, the lure of regeneration as a career is growing. But there's a good way to go before the field can raise its profile to the level of architecture and town planning.

"Everyone who works in regeneration knows what it's about and the variety of opportunities it offers," says Bura's Ladd. "There's a lack of knowledge in society about those things. But there's a chance that if you start working in regeneration at a young age you will get to change, if not the world, then at least the community you live in.

"In plenty of jobs you don't get to change much more than the photocopier's toner."