星空传媒

After years of working to improve higher education in the construction industry, I continue to be amazed and disappointed that the UK鈥檚 professional institutions are still failing to make any progress.

As the national champion for Accelerating Change in Built Environment Education, I have been increasingly aware of the need to ensure that higher education should deliver more than it presently does.

Students need practical experience of multidisciplinary team-working and a wide understanding of Egan principles and issues such as health and safety, sustainability and IT.

Yet this is not happening. Many degree courses are outmoded, and their providers are happy to continue adopting a rigid 鈥渄iscipline-focused鈥� approach to their delivery. Some courses lack communication with the industry itself, focusing on the professional institutions. Yet, although these institutions should be among the main proponents of the latest thinking, many of them continue to endorse outdated courses.

Despite the fact that those institutions have the power to accredit higher education courses, as well as having a large membership through which they can leverage their influence, they are not doing so. It is time they were much firmer with higher education.

Neither should this more progressive attitude be solely restricted to existing degree courses. It鈥檚 time institutions required, rather than simply requested, members to be up to date. If people want to retain their chartered status, they should have to attend CPD courses on pain of termination of their membership 鈥� with the institutions publicising examples to prove they are serious. Yet this doesn鈥檛 happen. It鈥檚 altogether a far too cosy world.

These institutions should be pushing the latest thinking, yet many of them endorse outdated courses

Of course this is not the first time that some of this has been said, although I don鈥檛 agree with recent suggestions that the institutions鈥� charters should be withdrawn. Nor do I support a single built environment institution, which would be far too bureaucratic and unwieldy.

At the same time we still need to bring to an end to the 鈥渟ilo mentality鈥� that prevents institutions from talking to each other and which continues to reinforce a university system whereby different disciplines rarely learn anything about the other subjects.

Among the many ways we could change this is to encourage new types of integrated membership, supported by a clear collegiate approach from the different institutions. The increase and interest in non-cognate courses that are being offered by some of the more progressive universities could, and should, be clearly supported by the institutions working more closely together with each other.

They could also be sense in some institutions pooling their membership administration and other functions. This is not only an economic and practical suggestion but it may be the very thing that helps brings the different disciplines closer together for a common good.

John Hobson is former chief civil servant for construction. He will be speaking at an Accelerating Change in Built Environment Education conference at the RICS on 7 June