Ben Marston of Jestico + Whiles and Chair of the NLA expert panel on education reports from the latest meeting and reflects as we close this expert panel cycle.

The NLA Education Expert Panel has met entirely online during this cycle. For our final panel, we had planned to be together at the NLA’s City base, but true to our times, we were hybrid, a chance at last for some of us to meet in person, others joined on screen. 

Our objective was to draw together the various threads of discussion from previous panels and distil policy recommendations for the New London Agenda being planned by the NLA. Over the past eighteen months, we have covered a lot of the challenges facing education in London, from a built environment perspective, ranging from Covid recovery and net zero, to wider issues like the creative curriculum and access to education. 

We had previously identified a range of priorities, so in preparation panellists had placed them in priority order to ensure we devoted time to what we collectively judged the most important issues. Access to Education strongly resonated as the highest priority, followed by Net Zero, Environment and Wellbeing and access to Creativity in the Curriculum.

Access to Education, to which we added Employment and Training, formed a large part of our discussion, which panellists linked to the offer of a creative curriculum in schools – the diverse nature of our panel includes education practitioners alongside built environment professionals – and the reduction in access to creative subjects in recent years. This has direct relevance to the built environment sector: ultimately if young people have limited access to creativity in their curriculum, they will be far less likely to pursue careers in our sector. Ideas included the NLA pulling together best practice case studies; rebalancing the curriculum towards creative subjects; partnerships with industry and the creative industries; making student accommodation affordable and producing a new model of flexible, accessible, lifelong learning space to address longstanding deficiencies in adult education provision. 

Achieving Net Zero, an overlap with another NLA panel, presents a particular challenge in education where much of the estate already exists and is continuously occupied. Ideas mooted included imposing a levy on demolition, zero-rating VAT on refurbishment and using capacity in the wider education estate to allow for programmed strategic refurbishment. The connection of net zero to retrofit brought other ideas including a presumption in favour of change-of-use to education and against changing from education, particularly external space. 

Wellbeing and the quality of the environment, brought a call, again, for the NLA to seek out best practice case studies from across London, for more Forest Schools, and, with landscape budgets routinely being the first to be cut, perhaps a percent for landscape / public realm / greenspace, like percent for art policies, that is ring-fenced and protected to improve the quality of the environment.  

The panel will be making some policy recommendations for the New London Agenda in the near future.  

And so concludes this cycle of the NLA Education Expert Panel. I would like to thank all of the panellists for giving up their time and for their various contributions. It has been an enlightening privilege to chair.