Newspaper
Academy sets bold remit
One of the Academy’s key priorities for their first two years of work is with professionals, alongside young people and communities.
Landscape Institute director general Marion Bowman, who attended the launch, said: “The Academy clearly intends to step up the pace on changing the working practices of built environment professionals. The message is ‘learn together and work together’.
“The Academy has a budget of over £10 million for 2006–8 and will be putting a lot of resources into pioneering new multidisciplinary learning and skills materials. Landscape Institute members are well placed to respond positively to the Academy’s challenge – landscape is the context within which development takes place and the diverse nature of members’ work brings them into contact with so many fellow professionals, clients and communities of interest. The Academy’s objective is to ensure that the education and training of new professionals has a broad sustainable communities focus rather than just a narrow, technical one. Our members are already working in tune with this objective.”
Academy chief executive Gill Taylor has expressed strong interest in the Landscape Institute’s work – particularly the new Pathway to Chartership – and, after initial discussions, will be meeting with president Kathryn Moore and the director general again to learn more about recent developments within the Institute, its university partners and to discuss collaborations between the Academy and the Institute. The Academy intends to focus strongly on undergraduate and postgraduate training and development, CPD and professional accreditation. They are also committed to producing materials relating to project management, community engagement and private finance investment that will become available in 2007–8.
Professor Peter Roberts, chair of the Academy, which was set up by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and now reports to the Department for Communities and Local Government under new Secretary of State Ruth Kelly, said: “In the past, we have wasted opportunity after opportunity to create communities that thrive and endure, often because of a lack of skills and knowledge to think through issues and see the job through.”
He added: “For decades we have assumed that individual professions can do everything themselves when the truth is that they can’t. Just as bad is that we have assumed that communities don’t have a central role to play in deciding the future of places in which they live and work. That simply has to change.” Discuss this article
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