36
Examination of witnesses
Terry Watts, Dr Jenny Russell and Neil Pinder.
Q1 The Chair: Good morning and welcome to the House of Lords Built Environment Select Committee. As everybody knows, we have focused a lot over the past year or so on the new towns programme. We are taking a slight pause from that today to start an entirely new inquiry—a short one—into something that I personally find very interesting and which has come up quite a lot in the new towns work that we have already done: younger people and their interaction with, interest in and engagement with the built environment sector. Today, we will focus on the education side of that—that is, the national curriculum, careers and skills. We have some distinguished guests and witnesses before us to talk us through things. Can you briefly introduce yourselves to the team?
Terry Watts: I am the CEO of the Built Environment Schools Trust. We are a charity aimed at improving young people’s knowledge of careers and opportunities to work in the built environment.
Dr Jenny Russell: Good morning, everyone. I am the director of education and learning at the Royal Institute of British Architects. I have a PhD in children’s perceptions of architectural space and schools. Children and the built environment, including how they engage with it, is a subject that is very close to my heart.
Neil Pinder: I am a secondary school teacher. I am passionate about architecture and changing the narrative around the built environment. I have been given an honorary fellowship by RIBA and an honorary professorship by the Bartlett School of Architecture for some of my work. I am honoured to be here today.
Q2 The Chair: The honour is ours. Thank you very much for coming before us today. As you know, we have a series of questions to go through. As I have said, if you do not know the answer, please do not feel obliged to fill the time; we are pushed for time, as are you. All I ask is for everyone in this room, us included, to keep questions and answers as short and concise as possible.
First, we are going to talk about the national curriculum. My colleague, Baroness Andrews, and I will ask you a few questions. Before we go into that in great detail, can you briefly give us your analysis or stocktake of where we are more generally on this, perhaps in comparison to other countries? Do they do anything that we could or should learn from?
On the national curriculum, there was a review last year. There are lots of priorities that people will argue should feature on the national curriculum; I love history so I would say that history should be in there. I am sorry to play devil’s advocate but does having any element of the built environment matter? If so, why?
Terry Watts: There are lots of questions in there.
The Chair: Sorry.
Terry Watts: You have done five in one, I think. We are not in a very good state, in that people do not really engage with the built environment in schools. There are some exceptionally good programmes—I am sure that we will hear about them as today goes on—where organisations take good-quality activities into schools and generate interest around the built environment, but they are patchy and unco-ordinated. They tend to be focused on London and the south-east or where the building is being done.
I live in a place called Abingdon. No one apart from me has visited the three average secondaries in Abingdon. They are good schools, actually—I will get told off if I say “average”—but they are normal schools. The only person from the built environment sector who has visited them in the past 10 years is me, as far as I know, because there is no big construction work going on there. It is vital to link knowledge of the sector into the curriculum, and it is very easily done. That is what we do: we provide teachers with materials to teach geography at every stage in the national curriculum from the age of eight to 18—key stages 2 to 5, for those who know the jargon.
All young people can do that. They all talk about urban environments, depending on how old they are. That is the built environment. They skip over it and talk about the urban environment in a geography context. We say, “This is why that’s important, and these are the people who do the work to create our environments”. It is quite easy to do. It is really important because it gives a context to the young people for their study. It also opens up a whole world to teachers, who do not know about the built environment either. It puts the whole sector into context.
There is so much to say on this. I cannot answer quickly but, going forward, it should be about places. There was a section in your last report about your work with some children. You saw exactly the same enthusiasm that they have for the built environment. They care about it at least as much as we do. They care about the environment and the impact of the 42% of CO2 that comes from the built environment at least as much as we do, because they will have to live in that world when we are all long gone. They care about sustainability and the impact on communities.
We can bring all of this out. We focus on geography. We would love to expand that to physics, maths and other subjects. In fact, one of our schools up in Brighouse in Yorkshire has managed to include English, history, geography, the sciences and design technology in using our schools programme, which, again, is free, to try to get the whole school involved. There is a little video that I can send around, if you like, with the youngsters telling us what they thought. It really does work. They have a natural passion for the built environment.
It is not difficult to inspire young people once you get into a school. As a sector, we do not get into that many schools. We are the biggest schools programme in the sector—in the country, probably; I would like to stake that claim. Just this year, we have engaged 242 more geography teachers in more than 200 schools. They have brought with them 34,500 young people in schools across the country who I know are looking at the built environment as a career destination through our My Environment My Future programme, which is free. That is great, except we have reached only around 500 schools so far. We primarily target secondary schools at the moment, but we are moving into junior schools now. There are 4,178 secondary schools. The sector employs 12% of the workforce and is responsible for 15% of GDP. As a sector, those 500 schools are probably the maximum number of schools that we reach in a year. We are not reaching most schools.
We go in as particular professions or trades, and we are up against industries. I do not want to pick on anyone because everybody does some really good stuff. We go in as surveyors, engineers or architects. Roofers go in and do a schools programme, which is great. Other sectors go in as the healthcare sector, financial services or retail, then people understand the specialisms. We are trying to sell individual careers in a sector that people do not know exists. We need to go in—this is what we do—as the built environment sector.
If Jenny were to go in with My Environment My Future and help us with the competition, she would instinctively give that presentation an architectural bias, fragrance or direction. If someone from RICS were to do it, there would be a surveying context. They are still promoting the built environment. Those children who are not interested in those particular professions will get the knowledge that other professions are available. We can make the whole sector more visible.
We went to a meeting up in the north-west in November. It was organised by Unifrog, which provides careers information in schools, and 150 careers leads from the north-west were there. We had to pay to go to that. It was not much—they gave us a big discount, which was helpful, because they want to work with us—but we had to pay for that. We were the only people representing the built environment because we are not co-ordinated. We do not punch above our weight. We need to do better by working together.
The Chair: Dr Russell, can you give your own perspective, as well as RIBA’s? The two may be the same.
Dr Jenny Russell: I will start by zooming out a little from what Terry has been talking about and talk about engagement with schools. I will talk about our schools programme more as the morning goes on, I am sure.
When we think of the national curriculum and what it is doing, there is a lot in it. There is a lot of learning that has to take place for children and young people. The built environment is a three-dimensional space, and we need to experience that. For me, the word “experience” is really important. Something that comes out when RIBA does its schools programme—we get this time and again in our feedback—is that it is inclusive. Any child or young person in the room can engage with it. We are building models and working as teams. It draws out all the young people and gets them to work and engage with subjects in different ways than just learning. That process of learning is important. The built environment, being three-dimensional, is a great example of a subject that draws together lots of the threads.
Perhaps I can give some personal experience. As an academic who has taught students studying architecture at university, when students come into their first year, often, you are trying to encourage them to think and problem-solve because so much of the national curriculum is them learning and coming up with an immediate answer. In university, you are trying to get them to go through a process and understand what “process” means; from our perspective in architecture, that is the design process. It means thinking about construction and the experience of people in a space, which is essentially what we do: we create spaces for people. In some ways, we are trying to unpick a bit of that and give students the opportunity to think.
Sometimes, we do not give children and young people the opportunity to get it wrong and to learn from that opportunity. We have so much assessment and learning by rote. I have a daughter going through her GCSEs at the minute. She is learning essays; I am not sure that I see the point of that. When young people go into any employment, particularly in the built environment, they need to be able to problem-solve and think through issues.
I realise that I have completely zoomed out from what Terry talked about, but it may give you a broader understanding of the relationship between the built environment, the way in which young people are learning and the way in which we need them to be learning.
The Chair: It is not just what is on the national curriculum; it is how you teach it and how you engage.
Dr Jenny Russell: Yes. It is also about the support that teachers have to do that. At RIBA, we have put together lots of resources for teachers. We have a national schools programme. However, teachers need time to go through those resources and think about how to deliver them. We take architects into schools. Architects are really keen to go into schools and engage with children and young people, but there needs to be space in the curriculum to do that.
You spend a lot of time on literacy and numeracy, so all the other subjects get squashed in terms of time. That is where all of the built environment comes in. You are trying to tie together all the threads from the other subject areas to equate to learning about the built environment, but teachers need time to work out how to do that.
The Chair: Neil, you were nodding a bit.
Neil Pinder: Yes. There were quite a few bits there with which I really agree.
I am going to come at it from a different perspective. By rights, people may say that I should not be here today, because I come from a council estate that is two miles down the road as the crow flies, opposite Battersea Power Station. My secondary school was a bit further down as the crow flies—around three kilometres in total. The most inspirational people for me, apart from my parents, were my art teacher and my music teacher. I would bet that anybody in this room had a teacher who made them think; that teacher is the one who changed your life.
The national curriculum can be augmented to suit different ways of teaching. I teach in one of the best schools in England: Graveney School. Its inspirational head, Graham Stapleton, gave me the freedom to experiment with the built environment and architecture. From there, I integrated it into design and technology. I turned design and technology into a subject that students wanted to know about.
As Jenny said, the curriculum is now quite constrained with Progress 8. Her daughter will have gone through the tests. Before that, in primary school, children have a test in year 6 via the Fischer Family Trust. That determines, in an academic way, their GCSE or A-level outcome predictions. If we rewind on that to make the tests creative and let young people think outside the box, I honestly think that the matrix may be a bit different.
Every one of you will have been on a beach and seen a young person digging a hole or playing with sand. That is construction. That is learning about the density of materials. How do you sell that? Trojan horses. I have invented Trojan horses to deliver my teaching. They come in as one thing but then they teach young people about the density of materials, construction, structures or aesthetics. You link those things in. You cannot just say, “I’m going to teach you about construction”. You have to slowly wind it into them so that they love the subject. Once they get a passion, you can change the narrative and get them to think about what profession they would like to be in.
We are facing, at this precise moment, a skills shortage. Young people—I see them all the time—cannot make. If any of you guys here wanted a plumber, a carpenter, an electrician or somebody to design something, the first thing that they would do is pull out a pad and do a really good drawing. You would say to them, “Now make that”. There we have problems. The national curriculum is quite constrained at the moment, as has been said. Creativity is the tool that gives everybody access. If we can get young people to understand that their creativity is a gift, we can broaden the national curriculum to accept that.
There are things that we can implement right now. The GCSE in my subject, product design, went from 60% NEA, which is the making and the project work, to 50%—that is, from 60:40 to 50:50. That 10% deduction may seem small but it throws a lot of young people off doing the subject, because it is taken up by a bit of maths and a bit more theory when, really, we should be asking and enthusing them to design, be creative, think outside the box, problem-solve and contextualise. All these things need to be implemented. If you have a daughter or a son right now and you see them playing, rather than being on a computer, it is such a relief.
The Chair: Yes, totally. Baroness Andrews, there is lots to go at here.
Q3 Baroness Andrews: My question is enormous. In relation to what you have just said, it is also very difficult, because you have set out such a brilliant and comprehensive diagnosis of the challenges and needs in terms of creativity, problem-solving and all the things that can be incorporated in good teaching and yet have a particular resonance in relation to what you have described as the elements of the built environment—architecture, design, CDT and understanding place. First, what can you, as professionals, do to present a more integrated vocabulary and offer to schools? How can the new curriculum, which we know has put bigger emphasis on PSHE and elements of creativity, take up a better offer?
Secondly, you have all talked about how extremely concerned you are about the skills market and jobs for young people. The different elements, whether it is construction, architecture or design, all have a different application in different bits of the curriculum. Are you looking for teachers and curriculum-setters to be more aware of how you can put the built environment and use the vocabularies you are all using in things such as the science curriculum—obviously, it fits in with the engineering bits of the science curriculum—or, as Terry raised, should we be thinking about adding a new element to the curriculum, however difficult that may be, in terms of how young people and everybody else fit into place? You could then bring together sustainability, demographic change, social behaviours, designing out crime and all the other social and environmental elements. There are two slightly different approaches, are there not? I ask Jenny to start and give RIBA’s point of view.
Dr Jenny Russell: In some ways, you have already answered the question that you asked. It is really encouraging to hear you talk about place in the wholeness of the curriculum. When I was going through the questions, the first point I wrote down was that, when we are asked to look at the national curriculum, the difficulty is that so much of the built environment is tying threads between all the different subject areas.
Baroness Andrews: It gets lost, does it not?
Dr Jenny Russell: It does. It gets diluted down to learning stuff about the built environment. As I was thinking through these questions, I brought it completely down to the word “value”. What do we value? We value young people. We value children. We value the built environment and the place in which they exist. Drawing those threads together within the curriculum would, in many ways, answer the question with which we are struggling.
Teaching creativity and design is not a key part of the PGCE. We need to be supporting teachers to do that. Creativity as part of place-making is really important. We need three-dimensional thinking. Architecture is, at its most fundamental, three-dimensional problem-solving. It is about how you deal with people in the spaces they are in. We are struggling because we do not do that three-dimensional problem-solving.
That is how children work and learn. I do not know about you but, when my young children were little, we would go into shops and I would say, “Don’t touch”. They were dragging their hands along everything and I was hoping that they did not break something. We all know what that means. We have all built dens out of the cushions on the sofa. That is them exploring space.
We have all these amazing children in our schools, but they are not all designed to be academic. They are not all there to be academics. Some of them are going to be plumbers and builders. Going back to that word, “value”, we need to value those young people, as a part of the built environment education system, as much as we do those who will become engineers, architects or specialists in their own areas.
Terry Watts: We are talking about slightly different topics, really. The curriculum has been set; it has been designed. It will not change for eight years. I have tried in various jobs for the past 25 years to change the curriculum but I have not been very successful. That is not something I will be able to do; you may be able to influence that, but I cannot.
I recognise that more creativity in the curriculum would be good, but we have got what we have got. We work alongside the existing curriculum and the awarding bodies. Thinking about the My Environment My Future programme, in GCSE and A-level geography, they talk about urban environments at GCSE and places at A-level. We say, “You need to teach this module”. There are six lessons. We look at the curriculum specification and the awarding body specification. We write lesson plans for teachers; they have lesson plans for every lesson now. We say, “These are the learning outcomes, these are the stretch exercises and these are the things you need to cover. Here is a presentation that does all of that for you”.
Embedded in that presentation are links to videos from RIBA and RICS with case studies of young people who have worked in the sector and are now environmental surveyors, engineers or architects. You can see real people, and they are presented by the teachers using those materials in the classroom. All of that is free. They can edit them, too; they can take them out and use their own presentations. We are not saying, “You have to use our resources”. They can just use those resources as a starting point.
We are using what exists already and making it work for teachers. You are talking to two people who have been teachers. There are some brilliant teachers around the country; I am not saying that there are not. Some of them are spending the extra time they have as social workers. They are running food banks. They are trying to help children cope with drug issues, problems at home and absenteeism. The pressure on teachers these days is absolutely monumental.
We work very closely with the Geographical Association and the Royal Geographical Society. Most geography teachers are members of the Geographical Association. We have to persuade them that we are trying to make their lives easier: “Just spend 15 minutes looking at this. You need no training because it’s about teaching the curriculum you already teach. It just adds to it, enriches it and makes it easier to do, and you can introduce the built environment”.
From our polls—we have thousands of students—we know that 94% of students do not want to work in construction when we meet them. As Jenny said, everybody slips into thinking that this is about plumbing and electricity. That is a very important part of it, but that is to the built environment what coding is to the tech sector.
I used to work for IBM. I did not want to join the IT sector when I was young because it was boring. It was nerdy. It was the people who lived in their grandparents’ basement and ate pizza. That was the stereotype. They had no friends and no girlfriend. No one wants that, but that was the situation 20, 30 or 40 years ago—I am that old. Now, the tech sector gets the people who have rejected financial services. I tell you what, guys: it is the same jobs. They do the same things. I ended up working at IBM. I did do some programming, but I also ran a business unit. I did marketing. I presented at various committees, conferences and all sorts of things. I had a really exciting job. It was nothing to do with coding. Most of the people in the tech sector do not do coding, but it is vital.
A lot of people in the built environment work in the trades, but most of them do not. There are around 500,000 professionals, not all of whom are architects, in the built environment sector. They are engineers, environmentalists and waste management professionals. All those sorts of people work in the sector. They do not know that those jobs exist, and some of them are really quite exciting. We need to make more of them.
I argue that we should stop talking about construction completely. People know whether they want to become a bricklayer or a plumber; they will find that out very quickly. I work with CBEE—I do not know whether you know it—which is Construction & Built Environment Education. They are the people who used to be advisers to what were the sector skills councils in universities, colleges, training providers, employers and schools. They care about the built environment and careers in the sector. We still meet to try to influence things.
I chair a little subgroup there to look at the case for a built environment GCSE. We want something that is more academic. We need to make people realise that this is not just a trade route. Why can you not have a version of business studies for the built environment? Everything you cover in business studies, you can cover in the built environment. There are careers linked to it. They say that teachers cannot teach the built environment. How many teachers have been in business? They teach business studies. There is a case for doing that, and we are working on it; I will be happy to share our statement with you when we finish it soon.
The Chair: Please do.
Terry Watts: It is not in the timescale for this inquiry, I do not think.
The Chair: You can share anything you want.
Terry Watts: We are trying to use the system as it is. I would like to see new GCSEs and a curriculum change, but we need to work alongside teachers to see whether we can help them do their jobs better or give more relevance and more of a careers slant to what they are teaching, because Gatsby requires them to do that now anyway. We do that by working within the existing qualifications framework and the curriculum that is there.
Baroness Andrews: Neil, do you see any scope in the new curriculum for you?
Neil Pinder: Yes, there is scope. I would not like another curriculum change. I have seen so many changes in the curriculum, and they seem to be running to stand still. As a teacher, I have to interpret another curriculum, which is based off another curriculum, et cetera. What I say to students is, “Creativity changes lives”. You can begin from that premise. I say to them, “Maths, English, geography and all these other subjects are absolutely brilliant. They can underpin everything that you want to be in the built environment”.
Instead of looking at it from the academic side downwards, we look at those subjects as underpinning what we want to do. We want to be engineers. How do we go about it? We want to work in construction—sorry for using that word. How do we go about it? It still involves maths, English and science. We need to look at it from that angle, not necessarily thinking that the academic subjects are the be-all and end-all. If we look at the curriculum from a creative angle and say, “All these other subjects underpin creativity”, we are looking at it as a glass that is half full as opposed to half empty.
Young people are literally asking for creative subjects. They are asking to learn about what they can do to change their environment: “We want more of a say in where I live, design, sleep and go to school. How do we do that?” When we are delivering the curriculum as it is now, we need to make sure that we incorporate all the elements that we want them to learn about in terms of their specific environment. All these things are going to take us from the past and stay with us in the present. We are building capacity, which is the main thing, for future generations to come so that they have value for their society.
Q4 Viscount Younger of Leckie: I have a very quick and specific question for Terry. You said that you live in and around the Abingdon area, although I note that you cover other areas of the country. You said that there is not too much going on there. As I understand it, there is a huge plan for a massive reservoir in that area. To what extent have schools been, and should be, involved in looking at all the aspects relating to that in terms of the built environment?
Terry Watts: I happen to live in Abingdon but the Built Environment Schools Trust covers the whole of the UK. Schools in Nigeria, Dubai, New Zealand, Australia and Cape Verde have picked up the materials and used them because they are free for anyone to use.
There is not a great deal of involvement in that reservoir, as far as I am aware, from the schools in Abingdon—it has not been granted permission yet; there are lots of meetings being held on whether it should or should not be—but they certainly would love to be. That is a great example of how the built environment is not about just houses. We usually think about homes, but it is infrastructure. My chairman says that it is the sector where you work, rest and play. It is the Mars bar sector. It is where you live; it is where you have your entertainment; and it is where you work. It is also how you get between places, how water gets there, how rubbish is taken away and all that sort of stuff.
Q5 Lord Cameron of Dillington: Good morning. I thank you all very much for coming. First, I have to declare an interest: I am a retired farmer from Somerset so my family therefore have property interests in Somerset.
Youngsters nowadays are almost overwhelmed by the amount of information they receive on their phones, from applications, from their contacts, on their computers, from television, maybe from newspapers and books, and possibly even from teachers. Most children think about how they can adapt their lives to the environment they find around them, rather than necessarily thinking about how they can adapt the environment around them to make their lives better. With that in mind, in an educational setting, what methodologies can be used to help raise students’ awareness of the built environment and help them develop an interest in this field?
Neil Pinder: We just heard a question about whether there is any input from students into this reservoir that is being built. I work with architects, planners and engineers from across the field. Like you, we are connected around the world—in this, by an initiative I run called HomeGrown Plus. We engage with companies that need to do procurements. If they are building an estate or an area, we work with the architectural or the building company to get students to think about how they would like it to be.
A really good example of that is Falcon Road bridge—I do not know whether you know it—in Clapham Junction, which has just been transformed. The council reached out to the community and said, “Could you put a team together and think about designing this bridge?” I brought this into a school. We worked with architects and engineers. We worked with AKT II, which is a brilliant engineering company that did most of the work for Zaha Hadid, and with companies such as Foster + Partners; I have a young architect there.
We bring people who work in the environment into schools to show children what they could do and what they could become. They are enthused by this. One of my ex-students designed and organised a series of workshops to show students how to work in the built environment. I believe in the circular economy of education, especially architectural education. I get the students I teach to come back and deliver packages and workshops so that we can engage with the next generation all the time.
These students will have a say in what this bridge will look like. They have to go down and do reconnaissance of the bridge. They have to do a market survey of the end-users of the bridge. They have to look at the structure of the bridge, how long it has been there and its history. This is just one example of how we can engage with young people so that they have more of a say in how they develop their art for the built environment.
Let us not forget Victoria Thornton—some of you may know of her—who founded Open House London. Every single year, in September, it opens the doors of historical buildings, et cetera, so that people can go in and have a look at the architecture. It is not necessarily for people who are interested in designing the built environment. Off the back of that, there was a sub-programme where she engaged with young people and got them to look at their environment. This programme has been rolled out by different people in several different initiatives over the years since Victoria started it.
To get young people to be more conscious of their environment, no matter where it is, we have to make sure that, at the same time, they have a say. That is the main thing. There is no point in engaging with them and getting them to do nice drawings if they do not feel as though their voices are heard. That is the main thing. Yes, they do have overload, but, if they find a passion, you will see them forget that overload. They will be working overtime to make a design, be creative about it—there is that word again—and give 101%.
As you were saying earlier, we have to engage with young people. That is the only way this will come about. Companies and businesses have to engage with young people. If you make them say, “I had a say in the lighting of that bridge. I had a say in the graphics. I had a say in X, Y and Z”, you are giving them agency—and word spreads through social media.
Lord Cameron of Dillington: Jenny, how did you awake the interest of the young in your subject?
Dr Jenny Russell: I enjoyed you talking about young people being overwhelmed by all the information that comes at them through different forms of media. At RIBA, we have a national schools programme. Every term, we work in a number of schools across London and in a different city each term. I have a schools manager who will go to the city and work with the school. They draw in architects as ambassadors to come and run workshops in the schools. As Terry was saying, in terms of what he does, again, this is a free programme.
The way in which they run their workshops is by taking the students away from the overwhelm of all that information. They work in teams. They get given a problem. They make models. They engage. They use their hands. They solve problems physically themselves, or perhaps they visit a space or a place and try to understand it. There is something about pulling away from the overwhelm to engage and use your hands. Children utilise different parts of their brains to understand the built environment. We are much more logical. When they are born, they learn about space quickly using their hands and senses. It is about giving them that opportunity to use those senses back, because that is how they problem-solve.
The programme reached around 15,000 young people last year. I am aware that Terry’s programme is reaching more than that. We are engaging those practitioners, architects, designers or people from the built environment in schools. We are solving problems, working with children, giving them a voice and giving them value to do that together.
As I said at the start, we are told time and again that the programme is inclusive. It draws in some of those children who might be seen as rowdy or are not able to sit through a lesson, because they are engaging in a different way. We will all be aware that we are seeing more behavioural issues and neurodivergence coming through in children. Perhaps our national curriculum and the way in which children are learning—there is so much to learn—is not helping or supporting that issue. We perhaps need to use some of those more creative methodologies to help those children find a different way of working.
Lord Cameron of Dillington: Terry, this is probably a question for you.
Terry Watts: I thought you might think that. We really need to focus on making the exceptional the norm. There are some brilliant programmes out there. There is the Construction Youth Trust, which gets disadvantaged young people into qualifications. It works in London—and not even all of London because, understandably, it works only where it can get paid to work as it is a charity. There is the Inspire programme run by RICS; there are also programmes that RIBA and CIOB run. They are absolutely brilliant. They are really good. I have been on some of them; I have been the employer and helped support them. It costs around £3,000 a day to run those things—not necessarily Jenny’s programme, but, generally, those things cost a lot of money. No one can afford that. We need to make these things more normal.
There are also things such as Pathways to Property. Around 150 young people are invited to Reading University by the property sector to do a week’s residential course, after which many of them go on to be mentored and supported by the industry. Some get bursaries from the worshipful company as well. It is a brilliant programme, but it is for only 150 people. There are 600,000 youngsters in every cohort. As a sector, we are doing a really bad job of making people aware of these projects.
I am so passionate about this. I come from Romford. I was brought up in Hornchurch and Dagenham. I went to a comprehensive school in Romford. Of the 300 who started with me at the age of 11, five of us went to university. How many of us had an aspiration to do something? None. You went to work either at Ford at Dagenham, which was open then; in the City as an admin person or something like that; or in a shop. There was no aspiration.
These are careers for people in Somerset. They do not realise that the built environment they have not seen change in their lifetime has been developed by someone, planned by someone, changed, repurposed, refurbished, demolished and rebuilt—all those things—and they can be part of making that change. If I can come from Romford and be part of talking to you guys, and you can make a change, so can they.
There are things that young people can do. We need to give them something to aspire to. It is creative, practical and socially mobile. This is one of the few sectors where you can start and find out about the built environment. Most of the professionals in the built environment never wanted to work there. If this were a group of surveyors, over 30% of us would have done geography at university and not known what to do when we left. Someone will have said, “Why don’t you go and be a surveyor?” That is what usually happens.
Other people drift across, as I did. I started, with my chemistry degree, working at IBM. Now I am doing the built environment. You just drift into it. People do not aspire to come here. We need people to aspire to go into this sector, where you can start as a labourer on-site. Fast-forward 20 years and you are running a building company with turnover of £10 million to £15 million, building extensions. There are some problems with that—it should be more regulated and we should have more structured education in there—but you can do that in this sector. You cannot do that in financial services or in almost any other sector.
There are lots of social mobility opportunities for this sector—if only people knew they were there and could aspire to do them. With only 6% of students being interested in construction when we first meet them, after our programme, which is free and done in the classroom by teachers—and without them even knowing they are doing it because it is part of the national curriculum—69% are interested in the sector, while 33% are choosing subjects that enable them to do that as a career choice. I do not have proper research but, anecdotally, the number of children who choose geography because they see that as a route to the built environment goes up by 15% in those schools that do our programme; I do not have the proper stats here, but that is what teachers are telling us anecdotally.
There are pragmatic things that we can do within the existing structures to make teachers’ lives easier, because they want to do a better job and get children more engaged in the subjects. That is what we try to do through our programmes. We run a free competition: pick an area of the built environment near you and tell us how you can improve it for the benefit of your community. There is a theme. It was sustainability last year; we have done one on well-being. This year, it is technology. Next year, it could be new towns. What would you do for new towns? They will give some brilliant ideas. We will get some brilliant entries, and that will be a great way of engaging their creativity.
As Neil said, some of the work they come up with is outstanding. The judges for the A-level cohort—there are different categories—say that some of the papers they present as part of our competition, usually via a PowerPoint or a video, are worthy of an undergraduate. They do really good jobs. They really are creative and engaged, and they really do care. There is lots that we can do to try to make that work, even in Somerset.
Q6 Baroness Janke: I am interested in what you have said so far. It seems that the national curriculum is a bit of a challenge because people are thinking of more and more things for schools to do and finding time within the national curriculum is very difficult. You have, it sounds to me, been very creative in doing that. The different opportunities that you have grasped seem to me to have been very exceptional and very good—as are the materials that Terry was talking about, in preparing and making it easier for teachers to include this—but I am interested in how this can be embedded in young people’s education a little more. One-off occasions and marvellous experiences are great and often have a life-changing effect on people, but, for the children who experience that, a whole lot more do not have that opportunity. I just wonder what opportunities there are.
As you said, the national curriculum is not going to change and suddenly make this a key subject, although we in this room probably think it a very important part of children’s education. What are your thoughts? For example, is there a need for more links with colleges and universities, or sponsored work in schools, to embed it more into the kind of work that children do as part of their education? What are your thoughts on that? You are obviously ambitious for it to be included much more, but you face a lot of challenges in being able to do that.
Neil Pinder: Last year, I was part of the UK commission for creative education, led by Lady Frances Sorrell. While sitting on the board, I came up with an idea, which I mentioned to the Grimshaw Foundation, the Thornton Education Trust and the many other trusts in which I have been involved. I said, “Why don’t we make a digital platform where we go all around England?” As has been said, when you go out of London, things start to fade a little—or a lot, as the case may be.
Can we make a digital platform—as some of us are doing now—where all schools and colleges can connect to each other? We could assign, say, architectural practices, engineering companies or others with different strengths to schools or colleges, then connect the colleges to each other—basically, joined-up writing. If we can start something like that then have a national competition, or a celebration of a week of creative built environment work, it will not be a one-off but continued; it will have the legs to carry on. So many people in all industries would absolutely love something like this, but they feel that there is some sort of disconnect. We have to join everyone together: all the architectural practices by which my students are mentored; all the engineering companies that can mentor my students; and all the people who come into schools.
I also have a programme called Demystifying Cambridge University, where I take students to Cambridge University. We do a programme for a day in collaboration with the great Cambridge people up there. It is about joining up all the people who have a passion, because, as you know, teachers do not get paid for a lot of they work they do. I cannot mention a percentage, but we give up so much of our time. All we want to see is people joining together with a more collaborative approach, making us feel that the work we do is really worthy, instead of something, as you said, being a one-off—that is, it gets legs then stops again. If we had that joined-up capacity built into the system from Scotland right the way down to Devon, and across the width and breadth of England, Scotland and Wales, I am sure that we would make a change for people.
We also need to give young people access to travel. Daniel Libeskind, an architect whom some of you might know, spoke about how to be an architect. He crossed out “building regulations” and X number of things. He said, “Travel”. That is what we have to give people. Those in underrepresented areas need the capacity to get their students to travel. Travel is the biggest point of access and the biggest leveller that we will ever have to give our young students.
Baroness Janke: If you had something like that, would it be a way of enabling young people to feed into the new towns projects, for example?
Neil Pinder: Yes, definitely. Remember what I said to you about Trojan horses. We created a programme called NYLON—New York in London. We went to architectural practices and said, “Sponsor us”. We got British Airways to sponsor us. We did an application process where we took part 1 students to New York. Anybody here who has seen any movies from America knows that you have your iconic structures: the Empire State building, the Chrysler building and the railway system. If students travel there, they will come back and be enthused to look at how their town is developed.
We did a programme called “the grid, the green and the greed”. It was based on students going to New York and looking at the greens, which they call parks, and their little segments, as compared to what our parks and commons look like. Then we did the grid system, where they looked at the streets of New York: how parallel they were and how some of them went off at a tangent, as well as the opulence of the people who live in skyscrapers such as the pencil building. Looking at these buildings, they get an idea of what the future could look like and, at the same time, look at how the past was developed. You are giving people a keyhole opportunity to think, “Wow, I’m really glad that my town has a bigger green than this little green here”. They are comparing and contrasting all the time. We must give them the capacity to compare, contrast and travel.
Dr Jenny Russell: I absolutely agree with what Neil is saying. I recently had the opportunity to hear from some teachers about funding they had received to help their students travel. Their students had never been to the cathedral in the town. They had never been to the theatre. All these experiences may be to do with the arts, but they are inherently spatial and about understanding the built environment, because it is about experiencing places. As Neil said, that opportunity for experience of travelling to different spaces is so important for children and young people, but so many of them in this country just do not have that opportunity.
Baroness Janke: Perhaps it is about embedding the awareness in the education system that we have available as well.
Dr Jenny Russell: It is about giving them that experience, with time in the curriculum to travel, but also the financial support to enable them to do it. It might not mean going to a different country—it might mean just going to a building that is close by—but so many young people have not had that opportunity.
I heard about this because I was at a symposium run by the Clore Duffield Foundation. Dame Vivien Duffield gives huge amounts of money through that foundation to support setting up learning spaces around the country in different cultural buildings. We have a Clore space in our home at 66 Portland Place. It is a great opportunity to have these spaces that allow young people to come to visit them.
Last year, together with an organisation called Beyond the Box, RIBA ran an event called the Festival of the Future. It was a weekend event that spanned two days. It covered babies all the way through to people entering retirement. There were workshops for students. There were workshops for primary schoolchildren. There were opportunities for families to come along and be part of that. There were opportunities to explain what lots of professions in the built environment are. We had 2,000 people come through our doors that weekend. It was a great leveller but, again, it was an event in London. If we could have an opportunity to take such an event around the country and open up the celebration of the built environment, it would be—
Baroness Janke: There is good practice all over the city. My own city, Bristol, has an open-doors day. There is an architect’s centre, but it is not used for the benefit of people right across the city. What I am trying to get at is how you can get much more of an embedded nature that is not reliant on one-off events and sponsorships. Can you give us some guidance on what we ought to recommend, given the challenges of making time in the national curriculum?
Terry Watts: When we had the questions come through for this session, I forwarded them to my colleagues in RICS, in CIOB, at the University of the Built Environment and at the Bridge report, which you may have read and which is about the property sector. They all replied, which was really nice, and there was a consistent message, which was even better. I cannot speak for them—I am not trying to do that—but they agreed with some of the things that I am about to say.
The work that we do as a sector to engage young people in the sector—we have discussed the issues around education and the curriculum—just is not joined up. We are not co-ordinated. There is no strategy for how we might engage with young people. There is no strategy behind any of this. We do not need to go too far to see how it could be done.
If you look at engineering, there is a group called EngineeringUK. My company has a headcount of just 1.2 full-time equivalents and we engage over 35,000 youngsters. EngineeringUK has 60 people. It does a lot more than we do. It does a brilliant job. It runs the Big Bang project, which you have probably heard of. There is nothing like that in our sector. We could do that for our sector. It is not too hard to do that. I can run it for you. By tomorrow morning, I could have it all set up. Is that soon enough? It is not difficult. It is just that we need to think big, be co-ordinated and get our ducks in a row. The exceptional projects that Jenny has just outlined need to be the norm. They need to be in Bristol, in Leeds, in Manchester and in Birmingham—and everywhere else as well. We are not doing that. We are just doing really good things, as you said, then walking away.
We also need to look to the industry. As an example, we bid for one of the development corporations and got the result last week. We did not get the project. To fund what we do, I need some income, so I am trying to bid for projects. One of the projects is in a big development corporation. It has around 60 schools in its catchment. It would like to engage with its schools to get more local young people into the built environment. It has gone for a project that will engage something like 10 schools out of those 60. They will do a really good job. I do not know the numbers, because I have not seen the winning proposal, but they will get tens of people engaged in qualifications and apprenticeships.
That is brilliant, but what about the other 50 schools they will not reach? They get nothing, because they have not jumped forward. By the way, those will be the schools whose teachers do not have the time to go and look at it, to invest, to write the bids and to get the kids in. They do not have the kids whose parents will encourage them to do it. They are the ones we need to reach. We need to be ambitious. We need to be big. We need to be bold. It is not hard.
From my perspective, we have done a lot of work with schools and qualification-awarding bodies on the curriculum. I have talked about geography. We would like to do the same with others who do not have the resources to do this. We can make the education system work for us. The sector does not do it. It does not really invest in the future of its workforce, except through Section 106 and CIL projects.
I have had some discussions with big companies that have said, “We would like you to donate to us because we are doing this, this and this”. They do not have the money to do that because they have already allocated other people money for Section 106 and CIL projects. I will probably get in trouble for saying that, but that is what they have done already this year, so they will not have any money for us now.
When you have a big development, as there are in many towns around the country now, they have a requirement to visit schools and engage the community. As Neil outlined, the community often enjoys that, and they get feedback. Our sector does not do that—it outsources this to consultants who do it for them. Reluctantly, it sends some junior people along to do a careers talk. That is not good enough, guys.
The best advocates for our sector are the people who work in our sector. Give them three hours off to go and do a careers event, to do some interview practice for kids or to tell them what they are doing in their jobs. Go and help support a project. What we like people to do is go in and do a careers pitch. We give them a presentation to use for that, which they can adapt and which introduces the whole sector, telling people about their particular role. Then they introduce My Environment My Future, which stays there. As long as we can get the funds to maintain the resources, they will be there for schools to use for free.
Then, help them do a competition. A month before the competition deadline, go in and look at the entries the kids are going to put in, and give them some hints and tips on how to improve them. By the way, that earns you £5,000 of social value in the metrics that the industry uses. It is life-changing and transformational for the schools. Why do you not do that? Why not just do that? Why outsource it to the exceptional projects? Why not do it as part of the norm of what you do?
One final thing that I should have said earlier on is that, if you want the curriculum to be right, the gold standard for the curriculum is the Design Engineer Construct! qualification, which you must know about. That is a specialist qualification designed by a group called Class of Your Own. It is on the funding framework, so schools can do it. Only about 80 schools do, because it is quite a challenge for schools to do it, but it leads to vocational qualifications recognised by universities and things for progression.
If I go to a school and it has that, my work here is done, because those guys know all about our sector, probably more than I do, but most schools do not use it yet. Those sorts of initiatives need to be the norm rather than the exception.
Baroness Janke: Can that be used as an option for GCSE?
Terry Watts: Yes, it is a vocational qualification. There are three levels. You will have to look at the website to get the details. It does all the things that I have talked about but in a formal qualification contextual format. It does need teachers to know a lot more about the systems and processes, so it is not for every school. It is something that, as a sector, we should be promoting and supporting a lot more.
The Chair: We will look into that. Thank you very much. I am going to suggest that, in the interests of time, we move on.
Q7 Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: This is such an inspirational session. I would just like to touch on the issue of resources, which you have mentioned several times. Neil, your idea of a digital platform is really attractive to me, coming from the West Country, where schools are isolated. If they could be linked in, in the ways that you were suggesting, it would be amazing. Where would the resources come from for such a digital platform and to roll out some of the amazing ideas that you spoke about earlier?
Neil Pinder: Do you want me to answer?
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: Yes.
Neil Pinder: Most of the structures are already there, as you were saying, with RIBA and with all of us. There are so many people who have the structures already there in place, but it is just a matter of talking to people such as you, going to communities, and saying, “We have this. Let’s link it up. Let’s do joined-up writing”. That is what it is, basically.
Most things can be rolled out within a week or a month, but not that length of time. All the programmes that I have been talking about and am hearing about have already been embedded, based, unfortunately or fortunately, in the London area, but they can easily be rolled out throughout the country.
We have people who have literally done this their whole life, and that is their passion, but they just need to be connected together. When I say digital platform, somebody has the umbrella and says, “Connect this person with this person, and this company with this company”. It can be done quite easily. You do not have to invent anything again. It is all there, ready to go. It is just about connecting with the right people.
Something that I have found is that, because people want promotions, naturally, and they want to move on, progress and move around, every time you do a project and you think, “Right, I’ve got it”, something happens. The person who you connected to and was passionate about it tends to have gone on, and then you seem to have to go back a couple of steps. It is about having the continuity of somebody who can be there or a system in place, so you can say, “For the next five years or whatever, I know that I can go and touch base with that person or that body. They will know what I am about and I don’t have to invent the wheel again”. That is one of the major stumbling points when you go to roll out projects.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: How many schools have a head of architecture?
Neil Pinder: None that I know of. Another thing I did is that I went to the architectural practices and said, “Give me all your books that you don’t want”. We now have an architectural library of all these books. It just needs people to connect with other people. I know of quite a few schools that have inspirational people, but the constraints of the curriculum and the fact that they need a bit more support are the stumbling blocks that hold them back a bit.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: Jenny and Terry, do you have anything to add on resources to take those next steps? Should they be coming from within the industry? I cannot see government funding it.
Dr Jenny Russell: It is a really good question. We want to make resources available. We also need the skills to be able to find those resources that are made available. We have a number of wonderful learning resources that my team has put lots of time into. As Neil has been talking about, there is a link there that is missing in tying everything together.
The schools that are ambitious or that have the teacher with the passion to take that forward will find those resources, but how we make them front and centre in connecting them to the national curriculum, so that they are available and accessible to all schools, is the bigger question that you are asking. There is a lot of reliance on passion and those who are interested, but that connecting umbrella for the built environment sector, which stands up as a sector and says, “We have all of these resources available”, is the hard part of getting the access into the schools.
I am aware that we are doing some of that from our perspective. Terry has a broader reach to schools, but how do we make the connection? There is something missing in the requirement of perhaps the national curriculum that signposts more strongly the built environment. I do not have the answer. That is probably why I am waffling.
Terry Watts: I do. All the people I have talked to and who have given us feedback agree with what we are saying. We would like to do this but we do not have the resources to do it. It is not a lot of money. I am not talking about millions. If you give it to a big organisation, it might be. We need a register of every school and who—a person or a company from the built environment—has been to that school and has a relationship with them there. It is only 4,000 people. There are 500,000 professionals in the built environment. If one in 100 took on the mission of engaging with a school, we would reach them all. I am primarily talking about secondary schools. Junior schools are much easier to get into because they are much more cuddly and friendly, and easier to do. That is possible.
As for the resources that would be used inside schools, there are amazing resources out there already, which you would not believe. No one knows they are there. Go Construct is the biggest ubiquitous piece of machinery available to us and is increasingly talking about things more than just the trades; it is not quite there yet but it is getting there. No one knows about it, because no one goes into schools and tells them about it. We need to just get that first overarching reach into schools. We need somebody to organise and co-ordinate how we engage with schools. That is really important.
Then, as we mature, when companies and professional bodies or anyone is inviting and developing new materials or resources for schools, link it to the curriculum. We work with the Supply Chain Sustainability School as well. Sustainability is an issue that schools do know about and are covering right across the curriculum. We must have some resources to teach on that. There are some brilliant resources in the Supply Chain Sustainability School, developed mostly by the universities and the companies in the sector.
If you were to do something for the curriculum, and take five minutes from there and two minutes from there, and look at half of this one, no teacher is going to do that curation of lessons, because there is no time. If we only talked to them beforehand—we can do this, because we have tame teachers involved in our programmes—we could say, “Make sure you hit these points. Those can be used in biology. Hit these points, and those can be signposted to go and be used in art or design”. It is not rocket science. The infrastructure is the infrastructure. We can develop the things that we can do as a sector to meet the existing infrastructure in schools.
I would love for us or anyone to do it. I am not protective. We have offered ourselves to the industry. “Take over and replace us all”. Just take the methodology, materials and stuff that we do, and take them to schools. That is what success would be like for us. It is all there.
There is also a group called Building People. I do not know whether you have come across this. There is a kind of guerilla warfare going on here. There is the formal way of trying to introduce the built environment, and then there are those passionate individuals who know it is not really working. There are 80 organisations trying to get women into construction. There are hundreds of organisations of passionate people who love the sector, feel passionate about it, invest their own money and set up a little thing to deal with schools in say Shrewsbury.
All of those people working together would be an amazing resource, but they all exist. The only place where they nearly come together is in Building People, which you may have come across and which is trying to get the smaller organisations that do not get mainstream CITB funding. They do not exist as far as some of the infrastructure is concerned, but they do a lot of good stuff on the ground on a day-to-day basis. If you look at its website, there is a youth section on there, which I am part of. There are about 20 or 30 companies there that work with young people.
Q8 Lord Ravensdale: Thanks to the panellists. It has been a really fascinating session so far. I should declare an interest. I am a chief engineer working for AtkinsRéalis in the Midlands. A lot of the challenges that you have been talking about in the built environment are very relevant to engineering.
I wanted to bring out a few points in terms of supplementaries. I was very interested in what Neil and others said about how it almost seems as if there is a regional bias here, in that there is lots going on in and around London, for example, and other regions of the UK, but other regions are perhaps missing out here. I wanted to dig a bit more into why there is that regional bias and what can be done to correct that.
Also, to the point around teachers, my wife is a teacher in a challenged secondary school in the Midlands. The point has been brought up again and again that teachers are very stretched. How are they going to bring this into their day job and how can we better support teachers? I am just interested in maybe digging into that a bit more. In some of these challenged schools, how can we better support teachers to bring this into the work that is being done in the curriculum?
Neil, I wonder whether you could start off, please, just on that regional point.
Neil Pinder: Basically, there is a big north-south divide, as everyone knows, which is historical. It was only when the pandemic occurred that people started to leave London and to go out to other parts of the country to settle down for what they perceived to be a better way of life.
How do we solve this regional disparity between the south and the north? The great Industrial Revolution took place. It was not necessarily wholly in London. It was around. Why can we not connect and recreate that sort of emphasis? You work with Atkins, which is all over the world. It teaches engineering. It has mentorship programmes that are available. Dare I say, we are trying to get a grant out of you guys at the moment?
The thing is that you have a fantastic structure there with Atkins. If you were to divert some of the resources that Atkins has into the educational sector and make them a priority in the outer shires, because you have the reputation, the name and your integrity, it has more weight coming from icons such as Atkins and other engineering companies.
We have to set up mentors from your company to go out into the field and, basically, spread the message. Before you do that, you connect with people such as us who are saying, “This may be the way to go. Rather than just throwing money at it, you need to do it in this structured way”. I feel that the regional breakdown will then start to occur.
Until icons such as you take the reins, I feel that, as you say, there this subculture of, “The revolution will not be televised”. All these smaller companies and people investing their own money in it to try to change the narrative need people such as you to say, “We are going to lead this project. We are going to be committed to this programme for X number of years, and make sure that we have X number of kids graduating with a certain level of engineering, urban development or built environment development”. That is your goal.
At the moment, you know the UNICEF gold charter standard. You could set out the criteria based on the UNICEF standard of education. If you have that, or a version of it, and say, “We are going to connect. We are going to do this and we are going to do that”—the operative word is “we”—“and we are going to plan for longevity to be built into the scheme”, I am sure it will take off. I am sure that it will be embedded in those hard-to-reach communities, or those that find it very difficult to get access to these education and mentoring programmes.
On the other side, it is teachers. As we have identified, we work hard, like your wife, and are underpaid, but we are still passionate and we are still in there. It is about connecting with and maybe offering those teachers some sort of bursary or something for engaging, coming to the table and bringing students from those underrepresented schools to your company.
That is how I feel we can support the teachers on one hand, enthuse them and, at the same time, spread the message regionally. You would have quite a few partners that Atkins works with, so you could spread the load out to those partners in engineering or construction companies that you work with. That is a good way to start looking at it.
Lord Ravensdale: Thanks very much, Neil. There were some great points there on the way forward.
Terry, you could perhaps dig into that point in a bit more detail around the support to teachers and making sure that this is not limited just to those schools that can spend the time to get out there and take advantage of these opportunities. Schools such as the one where my wife works are always going to be disadvantaged there because they just do not have the resources and the time to be able to do that.
Terry Watts: It is a problem. I would not say that it is a north-south divide. I would say that it is a divide between London and the south-east, and the rest, because I know that not much goes on in the south-west either.
For example, I mentioned 150 careers leads up in Manchester. No one from the sector turned up to that meeting. On the converse of that, I visited a school just north of the river and just east of the City. I do not usually do school events, but I wanted to do something because I did not know there was going to be anything there. I went along with the University of the Built Environment and we were crowded out by professional bodies and employers of all sorts because they could walk from where they worked to go and visit the school. I am not saying it flippantly, but it was convenient to do that. We need, as a sector, to do more of that kind of stuff.
If we had a co-ordinated structure that said, “Atkins”—I am picking on you because you raised the question—“if you could cover this kind of area, is there someone here?” I often get requests from teachers saying, “We are in Oldham. Can you provide us with someone to come and give a careers talk?” I have always managed to succeed with that because the professional bodies are great. They have networks of ambassadors, and they will go out on a limb to try to find someone. The professionals love doing it.
We even got a town planner up in Bury, who is deaf, and he was able to go and do a careers talk to a special needs school. That is perfect. He was a lead planner, and he was going to talk to a special needs school about the built environment. Those kids recognised that, like them, he was not someone who was fully able-bodied. There are lots of opportunities to do that. We can do that. We need co-ordination. There is no one co-ordinating this kind of activity at the moment.
In terms of making it easier for teachers, as Neil has demonstrated and Jenny has alluded to, the teachers out there are passionate. They want the best for their students. They want them to stay engaged. They want them to get more out of their education. They want them to do better. They do not want them to aspire to get a GCSE 4—which, for those of us who are slightly older, is a grade C, before they messed the numbering up—on whatever subject. They want them to aim for an A or a B, or a 9 or an 8, or whatever it is, if they can achieve that.
Lots of youngsters do not aspire, because they do not see the point. If you can give them a point, then they will work hard to achieve the requirements to go on to the next stage.
As a last pitch, we are piloting a new project this year, the Constructionarium, which is a 20-acre site in Norfolk on the edge of the CITB centre, where we are getting disadvantaged youngsters who participated in our competition through the construction technical excellence colleges—CTECs—which are being set up by the Government with their latest £600 million investment into careers in construction.
We are working to get those youngsters there. They will be there five days on-site. One team will build an offshore wind farm and get it to power a device in a house that they are going to build. Another one will lay a railway line over a bridge through a gorge, and make the train run on it, from scratch, in five days. They are 15 years old. No one has done that before. This is available. We could put that course on every week of the year with the Constructionarium, because they love doing it. We just need some money to do it. We need employers to sponsor that, because the public sector cannot afford to pay for that kind of activity.
The Chair: There is your pitch.
Terry Watts: Thank you. I got it in.
Lord Ravensdale: Thanks very much. Jenny, you mentioned families in one of your previous absences. How important is it to get parents and families involved in all these activities with young people and get them brought in?
Dr Jenny Russell: That is a really important question. Young people need support, not just from their teachers but from their families. There are lots of young people and children who do not get that, but it is really important that families, if possible, are engaged in it.
As RIBA, we are a membership organisation. We have 50,000 members. In the UK, we have a number of regional offices, as will many of the professional bodies. It is really important not only that we engage with our central hubs in London, but that we encourage and engage with the regional councils in each of those regions to be reaching out to schools, but also to families.
We run family fun days at RIBA. We open the doors and run events. It is absolutely about engaging parents and children in taking part in activities together, and it is encouraging to see. Families are a part of the puzzle. It is not just dealing with schools, education and teachers.
Q9 Viscount Hanworth: Can we be more specific about the use of computers to stimulate interest in the built environment? At one level, there is the architect’s drawing board, which has been replaced by computer-aided design—CAD—programmes, which should be readily accessible to students. On another level, there is urban planning. I am aware of a computer programme called SimCity—in fact, it started off as a computer game—that involves the necessary planning skills. Do any of the panel have experiences of these facilities that they can report to us? As a computer programmer, these are good ways forward.
Terry Watts: I have written to SimCity. It has “functionally stabilised”—that is the terminology—so it is not being developed as much as it was. I have asked them if we could do something. I would love to have a SimCity. We could use our own. We could get kids to build their own cities and things, and then relate it to the curriculum. I have asked whether they would work with us on that and they have not replied to me. They are based in Sweden. They have made lots of money. I am not sure that it is being redeveloped any more.
You are right about the access to technology as well. We have four categories of prize for the competition. We promote ourselves only to areas outside London, because London comes anyway. There are always schools in London. We go only to disadvantaged schools, but other schools get us, because they have the time and effort to find us. We get a lot of public schools. We had to have a separate category one year because the public school put some entries in, which were amazing. They had used the latest technology with all the best gizmos, and the schools from the state sector had to use pen and paper, so we had to have a special category for those things rather than disadvantage anybody.
You are right. It is a real problem for kids, but there are free tools out there. SketchUp is a really good tool. I cannot remember the name of the product, but Esri does a free schools thing. Teachers do not know about it. Students do not know about it. If we got the built environment message out there, we could tell them about these things. They are freely available for people to use, and they are brilliant.
Viscount Hanworth: Yes, absolutely. They are cheap but not free.
Terry Watts: Some of them are.
Dr Jenny Russell: I would just say that, as a year 1 tutor at university, we had students coming in who engaged with Minecraft. That was their way of starting to think three-dimensionally.
The Chair: We are hoping to do something around that in a couple of weeks.
Neil Pinder: I am sorry to put a spanner in the works, but I know that the value of people who can sketch is unbelievable. I do not know whether you have ever heard of Narinder Sagoo. He is Foster’s sketcher. If you guys can Google him, he is amazing. He enthuses people to take images and sketch buildings, architecture and structures. Also, Apple named its pen after him. He has transcended both. You can sketch manually and you can sketch digitally.
One of the only things I say to young people when they get into the digital world is that we do not want to see any more extruded houses. That is the death of the built environment. These extrusions just come up like square shapes. We want to see a bit more traditional, original biomimicry, a bit more of the organic shapes, and not necessarily the stretched organic shapes.
Viscount Hanworth: I was going to say that the laws of perspective are readily taught to quite young children, so that is one thing that I would recommend. Thank you very much.
Q10 Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: Can I say how immensely grateful I am and how encouraging I have found all of your contributions? Like Daniel, I have to declare an interest, because my daughter is head of year 11 in an incredibly challenged school in Southport. She has been with her pupils for five years since they were 11. They are now 16. It is a high school. She took them from Southport to Liverpool, not to go to certain well-known clothes shops, but to look up and see. It was revelatory.
To come back to your point, what barriers did she have? She had to find other members of staff. Did they have DBS checks if they were parents? Was there a budget for the coach? No. I am very interested in how we take this opportunity and engage it with the reality of what our teachers are doing in schools. I completely endorse everything that you are saying.
When they were 16, what broke my heart—and I am a northerner, so we can talk about that as well—was that they needed to do statements to go on apprenticeships, to go to college or whatever. This is recorded, but let me just say that not many of the families of those children could help them with the statements. It was the teachers, the head of pastoral care, the dinner ladies and whoever who were doing the statements.
What I worry about is that we have this wonderful activity, and then it stops. I was involved, very luckily, in the Every Child Matters legislation years ago, when you looked at a child from when they woke up in the morning to when they went to bed at night, and what they needed. You did not have the silos of policy. It was the needs of that child. You are talking very much like that to me. Of course, built environment is literacy. Of course, it is numeracy. Of course, it is where you live. During a certain by-election that I worked on recently in the north-west, some of the housing conditions that people had been put into were heartbreaking.
I was chair of economic development in Liverpool and, like you, I am a comprehensive school kid. What we developed was to say, basically, to our planning department—and I have said this in public before, Chair, so it is all right—“Give me three reasons why you can do something, rather than six reasons why you can’t do something”. Something that we have been talking about is any connection that we may have, for instance, with the trade union movement, which has regional structures. Are there ways in which we could endorse and engage them in all of this?
For instance, I have been in contact with the head of careers for Liverpool city region, having had some of this conversation. I am horrified that the north-west charged you.
Terry Watts: It was Unifrog that charged us.
Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: I talked with them about how we connect, as you say, with the structures that are there already. The words that struck me, having spent Sunday with 10 kids under 10 destroying my sofa and every cushion that I possess, as well as my bed, making dens, are experience, creativity, the linking of ideas to technique, and social mobility.
How do we create this around the local environment so that all of our young people and our teachers can have resources and time? What they lack is time. They do not have the time. One minute, they are teaching GCSE. The next minute, they are sorting out a fire somewhere in the boys’ toilets. That is the reality. How do we do that?
How do we work together to get rid of barriers, as far as we can? How do we overcome issues of money, resources, finance and time? I love the idea of having a registry of professionals who go out to schools and growing that, but there is so much potential here. I find you all inspiring, I have to say.
What did it for me was theatre and education when I was nine. I sat in a very draughty school hall in Coventry. I was allowed to be Australia in the United Nations and, for the first time in my life, I was allowed to make a decision. How do we get all that involved as well? I am very grateful. Thank you.
The Chair: There is a lot to go at there. Who are you going to start with?
Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: May I start with Neil, please?
Neil Pinder: I would like to start by celebrating teachers, because they do not necessarily get all the kudos and celebration that they want. I am engaged in a programme called Inspire, which is about how teachers inspire. It is an awards ceremony that happens. There is another awards ceremony called Imagine. They are all run by the Thornton Educational Trust. It would be really good if we could go and identify and celebrate these teachers for the work they do in the built environment.
You are then amplifying the voices, because do not forget that schools are like PR companies. They love it if their teacher is suddenly seen on a certain platform. “Oh, our teacher has an Inspire award. That means that they are doing really good for our school. Our school is really good at doing this”. That is where you can have a bit of influence with the governors. The headteacher could say, “This is our subject. We have a really good teacher”—or teachers—“who engage with the pupils, and they have just won this award. On the back of that, we can do X, Y and Z”. That is one of the ways in which you can get around the system a bit.
As you can tell, I have been getting around the system all my life. Once you start that process, it is a slow process of moving forward. That is what we have to realise. It is never going to be through massive steps that we are going to move forward with this. It is incremental because we are really established. We are governed by the curriculum. We are constrained by the curriculum. We are constrained by school budgets. Do not forget that school budgets are capped in terms of how much money they can give to various departments, because they have their maintenance bill and their teachers to pay, et cetera.
We have to understand that we are never going to get loads of money from them, but, if we can celebrate the teachers in there, that trickles down to the governors, who think, “Wow, they are doing a good job. Let’s elevate our school”. That is a way in which we can slowly get the subjects that we want to be highlighted and move up the Richter scale in terms of academia.
Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: Thank you so much, Neil. Terry, every barrier that you outlined resonated so truthfully with me. What can we do?
Terry Watts: I am more pragmatic about what we can do today. I would like to see the changes that Neil and Jenny have outlined as well, but, today, we can change the narrative. When people from the sector go into schools, rather than talking about construction, they need to talk about the built environment and introduce the wider sector with all the variety, interests and opportunities there are. That is the first thing. We can do that ourselves. There is a lot of resistance to doing that in the sector because they do not understand the future and the implications on young people, but that is another challenge.
The engagement starts in the classroom. That is why we designed My Environment My Future to be free, easily usable, and accessible to teachers in the classroom. Other people do not do that yet. They should start to do that. If they want help doing that, we can provide that, and let us expand it across from geography to physics, chemistry and maths, and all those things. That has to be done. It has to be learned about.
We need a central body to co-ordinate our activities so that we get some of the exceptional stuff spread around the country, make more of that exceptional stuff normal stuff, and make sure that every school has a link into the sector. That could be done by that co-ordinating body. We have helped teachers by demonstrating the pathways.
Working with the Royal Geographical Society, it did not realise that the built environment is a career destination for geographers. It did not know that. Why should it? It is not in the sector. We worked with it. We realised that together. Now it is promoting the built environment pathway for people studying geography, so more people are choosing geography because they know that there is a career at the end of it and they like geography.
They used to do geography to AS, when there were ASs, and then dropped it because they liked geography but have to do three subjects that give them a career or a university place. They now know where the built environment fits in terms of careers. We need to promote that.
We need a baseline built environment qualification. We are too focused on starting at 18 and becoming a surveyor or an architect. A lot of it is general knowledge. We should have a level 4 qualification. Maybe I have got the level wrong, but there is a level 0 that someone is promoting. What is the architectural qualification?
Neil Pinder: You have got part 1.
Terry Watts: Part 0 is before you start on your specialist thing. You do a built environment level 4, which teaches the whole range of what goes on in the built environment, and then you choose your level 5 or 6 qualification to go and become a professional in that sector. The University of the Built Environment is trying to get that off the ground.
That is something that we could do to try to promote something that makes sense to students and to parents. You are right that parents need to be influenced and to know that there is a future for their kids. Teachers can understand and make that. We do that only by centrally working together somewhere, rather than doing these fragmented things.
Curriculum change is really hard. Getting resources developed is complicated and takes effort, but it is quite easy. Getting a teacher to get their head out from the day-to-day wave of stuff coming at them and to recognise that there is free support and help out there is our biggest challenge. The best people to do that are those in the sector who have the passion and enthusiasm for the sector. We need to engage and mobilise the sector to reach those teachers, to get that energy and to unlock their passion for young people. It is all very doable. It is just that we do not do it. We do little bits here and little bits there, but we do not do a holistic thing.
Neil Pinder: At the moment, I have five students doing half a GCSE in architecture. That is run by the London School of Architecture, which has pioneered that. It shows the sheer commitment of these students. They go on a Saturday afternoon. It is not that they have to sit down. They get taken out to architectural practices. They get taken out into the field, where they are looking at buildings and landscape, et cetera. As we are saying, there are programmes there, and this is an amazing programme run by the London School of Architecture. There are so many different ones that are going on, but we can name only a few right now.
Dr Jenny Russell: Maybe just to go backwards and pick up on what you talked about at the start, the school trip and how you manage it, everybody learns in a building. The building that they are in is something that can be investigated as a piece of the built environment. It sits in a setting. Every school has access to some form of architecture—some better than others, and some more inspiring than others—but it can be drawn; it can be sketched; it can be touched and felt.
We need, as a sector, to encourage professionals to talk about using the materials and the space at their fingertips. Not every school has that opportunity to take a coach somewhere and to look a different space. If you start using those skills to look at the space around you in your school, then you use those skills to look at the town you walk around when you are not in school or to look at your home. There is an amazing little exercise of drawing the route to your school that is brilliant for children because they will draw it in a way that will totally blow your mind. Get them to draw the route to their bedroom.
It is amazing what children know, see and have picked up. Professionals and professional bodies need to communicate simple exercises that could be implemented by teachers.
Baroness Griffin of Princethorpe: Yes, please. Thank you all, enormously.
The Chair: That is superb. Thank you very much.
Q11 Lord Bailey of Paddington: Thank you for your contributions so far. Before I start, I just have to push back on the idea that there is a north-south divide and London is doing really well. To be clear, we have some of the poorest communities in Europe, not just the country. I just want to put that on record. We have some very struggling schools in London as well, and I have spoken in many of them.
I am going to come to you, Terry, because I do like your approach, which is very pragmatic, about what is there and dealing with what we have. I have been a governor of many schools, and still am a governor of a school, and I personally think you cannot ask a teacher to do something that is outside of the curriculum. You simply cannot. They will not do it because they have to deliver that curriculum, and quite frankly, if you are a governor, you would probably prevent them doing it. They need to deliver stuff that is in the curriculum, so your approach, around giving them tools to perform the curriculum, is something that can be scaled because the issue here is about scale. All the materials and tactics exist, but it is a question of how you do it at scale.
I have one other thing to say. The built environment does not exist as a trade body. I have been involved in schools for almost my entire working life. I used to be a special adviser to the Secretary of State for Education, and I never once heard anybody in education talk about the built environment in the way they might talk about the catering sector. They would talk about construction, which, by the way, is not a dirty word. It is a very large and productive part of our economy. I just wanted to say that.
If we are going to help teachers deliver on this idea of the built environment, does the sector actually talk about itself with that label? I do not believe I have heard it. What can we do at scale? This is my issue here. Everything exists, but it is about the scale. How do we get that scale, bearing in mind scale normally has a cost involved?
Terry Watts: On north-south, as I am sure the others would agree, the implication is not that there are not lots of problems in London and the rest of the country. It is really that, as a sector, we engage with London and do not engage with other parts of the country. There is that.
Construction is a very important part of the built environment, but it is sold as being the entirety of the built environment. If someone says construction to a young person, they think of digging holes and laying bricks. They do not think of surveying, architecture, engineering and all those sorts of things. You are right that, as a sector, we should use the terminology “built environment”.
I have been trying to fight that battle for years, and you can probably help with it. The Government should start to talk about it. Teachers do not know about it. It is a sector hidden in plain sight, and all our institutions are built around that. We have the Construction Industry Training Board—CITB—and the construction mission group, which is trying to spend the £600 million, doing things for construction, but I do not really know what sector they are addressing. Does that really mean built environment? They are increasingly using construction as the umbrella sector there. We should do that.
I do not know what else to do. I talk to some of these guys. Neil Reynolds is the chair of the Construction Leadership Council, and I have talked to him about it. I have talked to lots of them about it, and they all kind of agree, but no one is actually doing it. There is no leadership in the sector, which is saying, “This is our strategy for the sector” in terms of engagement, schools and all sorts of problems the sector has. There is very little leadership. I risk going on to a hobby horse.
We have a sector of 3.8 million people and 450,000 companies, where, if you get the biggest 10 companies in the room together, you may get 100,000 staff. There are no big companies in our sector. Atkins is probably one of the biggest, because you are in other sectors and multinational, but in the UK. If you go to retail, you have 2.8 million people. If you get Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons in the room, Tesco alone employs 300,000 people, 10% of the sector.
The Government do this all the time. I have worked with the Government for 25 years doing this. Every sector is like the ones they like, understand and can influence, and it is just not true. If you talk to the retail sector, you can talk to the big supermarkets and you can make change happen. There are lots of corner shops that have an issue as well, but you can make change happen.
You talk to the built environment; you get the big companies there. There is no supply chain. There are no big companies to talk to. They cannot make things happen. Automotive is similar. You have the big automotive companies, but their supply chains are static. If you go to Mace and Laing O’Rourke, their supply chains are created every time they get a new project, so there is no consistency of infrastructure to deal with.
We have to address this sector as a market and get employers to realise that it is in their interests to invest in the future skills of the workforce, the future workforce, the disadvantaged areas and the young people who need opportunities, rather than mandating it, as they tend to have to do for other sectors. They do that and then people such as Tesco say, “Okay, we will take on an apprentice at every shop”. Suddenly, you have thousands of apprentices.
There is no equivalent in our sector. We have to treat it differently. We have to recognise that there is a big group of big companies, up to 10,000 employees typically. There are then thousands of others who do all sorts of other things, and they need to be working with us to change the language and change the names as well. There is no strategy or leadership anywhere I can see that tries to address the sector as it needs to be addressed.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Let me go on and address the doctor for a second. One of my big contentions in the world is that we have too many academics in our education system. It has all become about academics. Fifty per cent of people going to university are doing nothing. It means we have very little respect for work that involves your hands. I spoke to the gas engineer who changed my boiler, and he makes a lot more than most of the people I know around me who have degrees. To what level of challenge is it?
I am glad that you all talked about parents earlier on, because you will get no change for young people unless you involve their parents. It is as simple as that. Most young people are pursuing what their parents think is important, certainly as a career. Is there a tension around this academic push we have had in the last 10, 15, 20 years?
I bet you every one of us in this room has a degree. That is what is seen as a success. If we are going to speak to young children about being involved in the built environment, does that mean a slightly different take on education and its outcomes? Is that important? Is that relevant? Am I wrong?
Dr Jenny Russell: You are absolutely right. There has been a push towards the academic and towards knowing rather than necessarily doing, working with your hands or thinking about more vocational subjects. Because the push has been academic from school and from government, it goes all the way up. That is what is seen as valued, and we see it in academic circles as well.
The number of firsts and 2:1s is slowly going up because that is what is valued, and part of how universities receive their QS ranking or their NSS score is how many firsts or 2:1s they are able to demonstrate. Those go up as well. This sense of what we value, in terms of what people know and the skills that those young people have, gets skewed because everything that we are valuing is to do with getting to a very specific academic point. The value needs to come not just from the teachers. It needs to come from government down. That is really important.
You talked about qualifications. There is now a push for about 70% of young people to have a level 4 qualification. That may be a good thing, as long as some of those qualifications are vocational and taking them in that direction. That is very important. I am sitting on the other side of the table as somebody whose subject is primarily academic. You need a master’s‑level qualification to become an architect. I am also aware that you could take an apprenticeship route, which would be wonderful, but we are losing the funding for that because the level 7 funding for the academic qualification of architecture has been taken away for that architectural apprenticeship.
There is a divide there in what you are talking about. There are these vocational routes, but there are also those routes that must follow an academic path. We need to value and be seen across the country, from government down, to value vocational qualifications and not be pushing for universities for 50% of young people, because we end up with lots of knowledge, lots of knowing, and not enough doing. We need to have both. Your point is entirely important.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: Thank you. I am going to come on to our teacher now, because one of my contentions about teaching is that we ask teachers to do too much on a day-to-day basis. Right from nursery, they make these silly reports that the teacher has clearly made up. The child is three; they have been throwing paint at people. That is all you can ask them to do. We write these reports, wasting that nursery nurse’s time. I think that trend continues all the way through school.
My contention in the teaching space is that, in order to allow a teacher to be inspirational, to reach out to different organisations beyond what would be happening in the school boundaries, teachers need to be given time, through taking away some of the more monotonous admin-based tasks. I specialise in policing, and a big thing in policing is about what a warranted officer can do and what a civilian member of staff can do. We need a similar concept in teaching, so qualified teachers can teach, and the paperwork can be done elsewhere.
I want to focus on what could be done in the route to becoming a teacher, and training to be a teacher, to allow a teacher to have the idea that “I can and should go beyond the sausage factory that is the curriculum, but in order to do that I need to spend more time in my subject, speak to people in my environment and other teachers in this same subject, or maybe a different one”.
Is there a way that schools could facilitate that? Could it manifest itself a little bit in teaching? I am very focused on the reality that teachers have a dense curriculum that they have to get through, and that is their primary responsibility. That is my start point, before we get into all that would be nice to have.
Neil Pinder: That would be utopia. I would love someone to come in and take a register for me every morning, or twice a day, as we do. I would love someone to come in and do those jobs. You have been quite articulate about how teachers get bogged down in the day-to-day things, which do not necessarily reflect their passion or why they got into teaching, for example to do geography, maths, science or whatever.
The word “vocational” automatically makes people think, “Oh, I am on holiday”. I do not think it gives it the kudos that reflects the importance, which we are trying to get people to understand, of this particular subject that they are actually studying. Maybe we could replace the word “vocational” with a word with a bit more substance and gravity that will make people think, “Oh yes, that’s worth doing”.
You are quite right that parents are the ones who you have to talk to. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, lawyer or accountant, or along those lines.
Lord Bailey of Paddington: I was a source of disappointment to my mother.
Neil Pinder: My mum was a nurse, so she was quite liberal, but when I said to my mum, “My teacher said that I could go to art school”, she said, “Art school? What’s that? Can you get a job?” I am thinking, “I want to be a sculptor”. I really wanted to be a sculptor, so I used to go to Saturday morning schools at Camberwell to do sculpture. At the end of it, I came out of art school with a degree, doing three-dimensional design, but getting a degree and going into that sort of fraternity gives you transferable skills. You meet people of a similar academic standing from around the world, and it enables you to communicate with those people.
I value an apprenticeship. You were talking about the level 6 apprenticeship that Grimshaw has pioneered, which is there just about, and the level 7 apprenticeship, which is fast fading because of funding. Apprenticeships is another really valuable route. Take Germany. Germany has X number of young people who have passed through its apprenticeship programmes by the age of 21. Apprenticeships give you the versatility of earning money, learning on the job and communicating. You become a bit more of an adult when you are in the world of work, should we say, rather than being at uni, where I had a brilliant time. I am saying to you that it is different horses for different courses.
We will always need the academic side, and people will always gravitate to the academic side, but we need to upscale the creative side and make sure that people who work in the two‑dimensional and three-dimensional aspects are valued as much and are represented. That is where there the divide comes between the people who are academics and the people who are more creative. It is like a social standing: are you academic or are you creative? If you are creative, you are seen as away with the fairies a bit; if you are academic, you are seen as really focused and everything else.
I can guarantee that anyone who has a son, daughter or child—they or them—and has seen a young creative person at work will know they blow your mind. They simply blow your mind. A young, gifted kid who is good at maths, science and everything blows your mind, but they should all be on the same path. There should be no differentiation between the two. They should be valued by society in just the same way. Once we have done that and merged them all together, everybody will be seen as an equal, regardless of what profession you study.
We need just a little bit of time out for people to understand what we are asking of society for the next X number of years. We really need to sit down and say, “In the digital and AI world we are going to lose so many different jobs. So many jobs classified as for white collar workers are going to disappear”. We have to rethink how we are going to move forward and keep people employed, because the last thing we want is a load of people just not being employed because AI is taking their jobs. That is going to be the challenge for the future.
If you ask me—and this is a tagged-on question—whether AI is going to take up all the creativity or fill the vacuum of creativity, I say no, because creatives do not think that way. There may be programs that can reproduce this and reproduce that, but creatives are always—
Lord Bailey of Paddington: I would argue that there is a level of admin where people need to worry about AI, but most jobs will survive out of it. Most of the companies in the world that have got rid of people because of AI are busy trying to get those people back. That has happened.
Because of time pressures, I am going to bring my questioning to an end, but I just want to pose this challenge, Chair. It sounds to me that the built environment sector has a PR problem as much as anything else. What is it about?
We have to bear in mind two things. One is the cost of all of this. It is fine when you engage private companies, but that comes off their bottom line, and they are in a very high-tax environment at this time.
The other thing I forgot to state, Chair, is that I am the chairman of Faraday Ventures, and we try to build social and low-cost housing. I have to state that as part of our admin.
Lastly, Chair, I actually have to leave.
The Chair: That is fine. It has come to an end anyway. I know that lots of you want to come in, and I am sure we could have carried on for ages. Please do write in. If you are anything like me and you wake up at 4 am thinking, “I wish I had said something”, please do write in.
Neil, just coming back to your earlier point, you said it was an honour to be here. The honour was all ours today, genuinely, to have all three of you with us. There is one specific thing—perhaps, Terry, you could follow up with us, but it applies to all of you—just about that transition from education into training. Concrete examples of how it is working, or is not, and what more could be done to bring the two bits together, would be appreciated.
Neil Pinder: Can I just end with “Ordinary Teacher”, a poem that I wrote?
The Chair: Go ahead.
Neil Pinder: I am just an ordinary teacher. By those who choose to judge me, I am just an ordinary teacher, but from this ordinary teacher has come extraordinary students. They have achieved far beyond what the ordinary system would have you believe.
I have seen these extraordinary students who are creative, who have a passion for architecture. They have a passion for the built environment, but most of all they have a passion for life, far beyond what the ordinary system would have you believe.
I have seen these extraordinary students grow up with babies, get married, with families, not necessarily in that order, and they have achieved far beyond what the ordinary system would have you believe. Maybe, just maybe, it is good to be an ordinary teacher, teaching extraordinary students in an ordinary system that has the belief.
The Chair: That was a great ending. Thank you very much. With that, the meeting is over.
