Teach First

In each issue of Citizen, we interview a host of game-changers: those who are a catalyst for progressive change in their field, those who are redefining industries, and those who are bringing others into it who didn’t even know it existed. Given this issue’s topic of education, we have profiled movers and shakers who are disrupting the pedagogic profession and acting as a definitive force for good. Beyond asking them how and why, one of the key questions we ask is how success is measured. How achievement is defined is speculative, yet it is crucial to understanding what makes any endeavour worthwhile.

Education, and our access to it, is ever-widening. The internet’s rapid expansion over the past decade has enabled more people to access education than ever before. But this also has its pitfalls. We live in a time of information overload, so who we learn from, and how, matters.

Profiled in this issue are not just schools of architecture, but people and organisations contributing to the entire sphere of education pertaining to the world around us. By shedding light on their efforts, we hope to inspire the next generation of educators and to also, most pertinently, highlight our shared agenda: making a better, more sustainable world, something which can only be a collaborative effort.

What are you trying to achieve and why?

With the Independent School for the City we aim to create an independent and critical community of learning for all professionals who work on the city. It is a school in, of, and for the city. We build on the conviction that strategies for the city – architectural and economic, spatial and social – should be based on real, first-hand, empirical research. Empirical because the reality of the city offers interesting conflicts and unpredictable synergies to learn from and build upon. It is a school that is not constrained by the formalities of academia or disciplinary boundaries. Participants and teachers form one team in which the advanced and less experienced inform each other. Our courses and the research conducted within the school, is not necessarily solution-oriented or focused on final designs, and may not come to design as such, but will lead to a text, a film, an exhibition or an action. Our approach is open-minded but critical, inclusive but discerning, flexible but precise. With this, we hope to offer the participants and ourselves the full intellectual freedom to research the city in the broadest sense. It will give us the chance to have seemingly coincidental encounters with parts or aspects of the city where clashes of various kinds take place, where otherwise invisible realities reveal themselves. These are, we believe, the instances that can teach us fundamental things about the city in all its complexity.

What’s your business model?

The Independent School for the City mainly runs on subsidies and donations. Only a small percentage of the costs are covered by ticket sales and the fee for participants in our courses.

How do you measure success?

Happy students and in-depth conversations and projects. For us it’s most important that people develop their own critical position towards urban issues that they find important. We create a learning community that should facilitate this.

How did you get where you are today?

We founded the school in October 2018. It started with a bold idea based on the work that we’ve done over the past 25 years within our own practices Crimson Historians and Urbanists and ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles). At Crimson we’ve always followed two parallel paths in our work: on the one hand, the traditional role of the architectural historian who researches, gives his opinion, stands on the sidelines and contributes to the debate through reflection. But we have also always tried to get actively involved as well, so that criticism and reflection can become operational. We found ZUS in their activist and critical position as designers and have worked together on various projects. While many members of our team have been teaching at different universities around the world, we realised that this more activist approach, in which empirical research is translated into compelling stories and critical strategies, was not educated anywhere yet. We worked out a project proposal for the school and discovered there was a lot of enthusiasm for the initiative. We managed to get some subsidies to start it up and here we are.

What are you trying to achieve and why?

I want to give everyone that wants to be part of the world of architecture the opportunity to succeed to their full potential within it. Equality is important in all aspects of life and is extremely relevant in the making of our cities, which will only successfully reflect the people they are made for, when they are designed by professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds.

Urban Learners and Celebrating Architecture are committed to bringing diversity into the built environment professions (so that our future cities will reflect the people they are designed for). We are also passionate about highlighting to industry the decline in numbers of students taking GCSEs and A levels in art, design and technology (due to government policies) and the impact this will have on the number of young people from non-traditional backgrounds, to our sector, entering creative industries.

We are addressing this issue of increasing diversity in the world of architecture by developing and delivering a variety of enrichment programmes for young Londoners from all backgrounds and ages. Our activities support and promote the teaching of creative and core curriculum subjects and are a place where our pupils can meet professionals that look like them. These experiences are inspirational and aspirational for our pupils, the majority of whom would never normally get the opportunity to work alongside architects or visit exemplar architecture and city spaces. The workshops also start to empower young people with the knowledge and skills to have a say in making their cities better places to live, as active citizens and potential future designers.

Architecture and design students from diverse and non-traditional backgrounds assist us in delivering our workshops. Their input is vital in keeping our activities fresh and relevant, and in helping to inspire our pupils, and by supporting our freelancers and volunteers we help them develop their practice.

How did you get to where you are today?

I made a sideways career shift from being an architect to educator 10 years ago. I was made redundant which was the push I needed for change. As an architect I had worked almost entirely on designing educational buildings, a combination of this and having a young child made me curious about the different methods and practices of teaching and the connections between learning and design processes. I was lucky to go back to university, as a mature student, to study a master’s degree in Design Education at Goldsmiths, which was an amazing learning experience and where I gained the foundations for what I do today. Immediately after gaining my master’s degree I became education manager at Open City for nearly five years, which gave me the confidence to set up Urban Learners in 2018, which along with Celebrating Architecture have gone from strength to strength.

Who or what inspired you when you were at school?

I remember being taken to the Architectural Association (AA) for lunch by my godparents when I was about seven years old, and thinking what a fantastic place it was and how I’d like to be in that kind of  environment when I grew up. That experience was the beginning of knowing I wanted to work in creative industry, and with the help of my brilliantly bohemian and caring art teacher I made it. I actually did end up studying at the AA thanks to their initiative in the 1990s to give bursary scholarships to UK students (‘thanks’ to Mrs Thatcher, the AA as an independent school had their right to provide a free education removed from them in the early 1970s, resulting in the vast majority of students from then onwards being international).

What lessons have you learnt / what advice would you give your younger self?

I would advise myself not to worry so much – and say to myself you can do it. That there is no need to be such a perfectionist and that you can’t possibly know everything, and that you’ll always be learning. Learning new drawing and model-making techniques, learning new software programs, learning about educational pedagogies in order to be able to design schools, learning about the latest environmental technologies, learning about the importance of diversity, learning about the national curriculum, learning from our pupils’ observations of the urban landscapes that we explore together – always learning.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?

There are several challenges:

• Making sure that the learning activities I design are engaging for the pupils, teachers and architect volunteers;
• Helping our architect volunteers ‘lose’ their rhetoric during workshops, which can be one of the biggest barriers to accessibility into architecture for young people because they don’t understand the language being spoken to them, and can therefore feel excluded. Communication is key. It’s fine to use specialist words, such as ‘section’ or ‘cantilever’, but only if you also explain what they mean, otherwise the ‘door isn’t opened’ but kept firmly closed to them, however well-intentioned the volunteer.

What’s next for you?

During lockdown I have almost gone ‘full circle’ in my career as an architecture educator, as Celebrating Architecture and Open City have teamed up to deliver a creative learning platform – ‘Learning from Architecture’ – a new website bursting with design challenges and architectural activities for families, teachers and young people in London during lockdown and beyond.

This is a fantastic initiative and it’s a pleasure to work on such a collaborative project. We hope to collaborate with others in the future and the ‘new normal’, to provide creative opportunities for young people from all backgrounds, which I hope will once again be able to take place back in classrooms and cultural spaces, and until that time please look at and be inspired by Open City.

What are you trying to achieve and why?

I’m trying to encourage, support and enthuse creative talent from young people from non-traditional and traditional backgrounds into the creative industries, primarily architecture and engineering. I want to give everyone the opportunity to achieve their true potential. For too long people from diverse backgrounds who are talented, have not had a fair opportunity or access to knowledge or support to enable them to navigate their way through the system – they do not have a network of contacts to open doors for them.

What’s your business model?

Our model is to work at grass roots level from Key Stage 1 primary school to Key Stage 5 upper sixth form level, designing and delivering creative architectural workshops. These are delivered through ‘Celebrating Architecture’ and ‘Urban Learners’, supported by the GLA, the Architecture Foundation, and several leading architectural practices. The result is architects working alongside educators to inspire and enthuse young learners from all backgrounds.

How do you measure success?

We measure our success by the growing number of schools and young people who are taking our programmes, going to university to study architecture, and ultimately having successful careers. Our alumni who want to come back and work with us as mentors, coaches and teachers. Our projects are expanding so we are successfully reaching more young people, some of whom have never heard of architecture, or never dreamt they could be one. Furthermore, the increasing number of high-profile architecture practices who want to work with us is a measure of success for us.

How did you get where you are today?

Hard work. I went to the Camberwell School of Art and I had a passion for teaching, diversity and architecture. I volunteered for 15 years with the London Open House as a steward and guide, and became a trustee of the Stephen Lawrence Trust to promote architecture to minority students. I have also been a product design and art teacher for over 30 years.

Who inspired you at school?

My art teacher Norman Barwick, who was also an art director at the Questors Theatre. He recognised that I had artistic talent and encouraged me to explore all forms of art, and educated me about art that I never knew existed. He encouraged and supported my application to Camberwell Art School. Working with Victoria Thornton at London Open House was another inspiration. She made the connection between product design and architecture, and made it acceptable for my students to enter architectural competitions.

What lessons have you learned?

To infiltrate the architectural world as an educator, you need people who are architects to open doors through their contacts, and use the right language. You need people who believe in you and encourage you no matter what level you are. You need others to put their time, energy and knowledge into your projects who can also support the projects financially.

What advice would you give your younger self?

It takes time, energy, passion, and a network of supporters. Never give up and always believe in your dream. Keep changing and keep a young mind.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?

Getting financial support to enable the projects to go ahead. Getting institutions to recognise they need to change for the future sustainability of architecture and the built environment. They need the talent of a diverse population to have their say in how the community should be designed and developed.

What’s next for you?

To enthuse more young people from diverse backgrounds into architecture; to extend the Celebrating Architecture and other workshops to more universities, colleges and schools around the country and to further extend the programme to other countries; to expand the mentoring scheme to include prominent architects and academics; to develop more creative projects, and expand our online learning platform; to expand our Homegrown Plus Alumni membership.

What are you trying to achieve and why?

Public Practice is about improving the quality, and equality, of everyday places. The events of the last few weeks and months have highlighted the structural inequalities in our health, our housing, our society. These inequalities are built into our environment. But as built environment practitioners, we have relatively limited agency to really tackle these issues. I certainly felt that in private practice I ended up working for the people that could afford it, and not the everyday places where I was most needed.

We believe the public sector, and local government in particular, is one of the few kinds of organisations where built environment practitioners can tackle these structural issues at scale, and genuinely work in the public interest. So we’re placing architects, planners, urbanists, engineers, surveyors, sustainability experts and others in new roles within public authorities. In the short-term, it’s helping to build the public sector’s capacity for proactive planning. Over the longer-term, we hope we can collectively rewrite the job description of the public planner, and rethink the role of the public sector in the way places change.

What’s your business model?

Public Practice is a not-for-profit social enterprise, and at its core is our placement programme. We recruit cohorts of around 30 Associates every six months who are placed within Authorities for a minimum of 12 months. The Authorities pay their salaries, which are between £30,000-£70,000, and pay us a placement fee of £5,000. This income covers around 70% of the costs of running the programme. The rest is covered by public, private and third sector Partners who give us grant funding which allows us to keep the programme affordable for Authorities and accessible for Associates. The funding from Partners comes without restriction, which means they have no say over how we spend it, and no involvement in how Associates are selected, where they are placed, or what work they do.

How do you measure success?

Measuring our impact is difficult, because planning takes a long time to play out. Ultimately, the judges of whether we’re successful will be future generations that live in the places our Associates are working in. In the meantime, we can measure how much additional capacity we’re building in the public sector: so far that’s 177 placements across 46 Authorities, which adds up to over 35,000 days of additional expertise. We measure how diverse our cohorts are: so far 64% of Associates have been women and 26% from ethically diverse backgrounds. We’re deepening our understanding of the value of less visible but equally important aspects of diversity, including disability, sexuality, neurodiversity, and lived experience. We record the qualitative differences Associates are able to achieve within their first year – within their organisations, and in the field. And we look at what they go on to do after the end of their placements: so far 91% have continued in the public sector.

How did you get where you are today?

My path has been similar to many of the Associates, and many of the others in the Public Practice team: Pooja Agrawal, Nikki Linsell, Claire Jamieson, to name a few. I studied architecture but found the scope of private practice frustratingly narrow – I didn’t want to be designing the right answers to the wrong questions, or even assuming that the answer had to be a building in the first place. So I decided to move upstream to Croydon Council, where I was lucky to work with some outstandingly talented colleagues. The nine years I spent there and then at the GLA were an amazing education in how you can influence the built environment beyond the red line of any building, over much longer lifecycles than any contract, and in the interests of citizens not clients. I co-founded Public Practice with Pooja as an organisation that could help others make a similar move.

What lessons have you learnt?

I went into architecture education at a time when the height of success was seen as putting your signature on a building. Starchitects designing iconic projects for the front pages of magazines. I think I’ve learnt along the way that you can get much more meaningful things done if you’re willing to cede and share authorship. That might mean being pleased if a politician says that your idea is theirs, opening up an initiative to more diverse voices, or trying to get a project to a point where it works without you.

What advice would you give your younger self?

I think I’d keep on reminding myself to speak less and listen more. To ask more questions, and give fewer answers. To be honest I still constantly need this reminder.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in trying to do your job?

I think the biggest challenge I face in trying to do my job is balancing it with not doing my job. I’ve slowly come to the realisation that to work well, you need to learn how to be off work well. Looking after my four- and seven-year-old children during the last year of lockdowns has both made that more evident than ever, and more difficult than ever. Hopefully the experience is helping everyone develop healthier attitudes and expectations about work.

What’s next for you?

Public Practice is really working now within London and the wider South East, for practitioners with at least 3 years’ experience in disciplines like architecture, urban design, planning, landscape and community engagement. The next challenge for us an organisation is how we can scale its impact to a broader range of geographies, careers stages and disciplines. After establishing Public Practice over the last 4 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that this next phase of growth needs someone with new energy and ideas – and I’m delighted that Pooja Agrawal is taking over from me as Chief Executive this summer. I can’t think of anyone better for the job.

For me personally, the next step is taking on the role of City Architect for Malmö in Sweden. In some ways, I’ll be putting myself back in the shoes of being an Associate, and trying to draw on all of the experiences and learning I’ve gathered from Public Practice’s extraordinary community of Associates and Alumni.

Who or what inspired you when you were at school?

I studied architecture in Prague shortly after the political and social changes in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. We were very lucky that people who emigrated or had been driven out to the free part of the world at the time – some already in the first wave of emigration from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic after the Communist coup in 1948, others after the Soviet occupation in 1968 – returned to teach us. If it had not been for them, I probably wouldn’t have been so inspired and motivated. There was so much our field had to recover from after 50 long years of devastation and central planning.

I was inspired by the independent and original style of Martin Roubík, architect living in Norway (co-founder of the Snøhetta studio), the depth and originality of Martin Kubelík’s thinking and the rigorousness and regionalism of Miroslav Šik. There were also Czech architects who joined the faculty in the first wave after November 1989 – people who work more or less on the local scene, like Alena Šrámková or the philosopher Oldřich Ševčík.

And, of course, great international figures of architecture – but I knew them rather from books and magazines. Personal experience with their work came gradually. I have always loved history of architecture and it has been – and always will be – the source of my inspiration. 

What are you trying to achieve and why?

My present career in education has to do – most likely – with my great disappointment at how provincial, hierarchical and narrow-minded education was here and, conversely, how creative, inspiring and respectful to others it was elsewhere. We are now more than 30 years away from the changes of 1989. Fortunately, education in our part of the world is rather different today – but not everything has changed. Almost on a daily basis I see and run up against examples of narrow and totalitarian thinking, albeit things are slowly getting better. I founded a school of architecture with my colleagues; our vision was – and still is – to show that learning can be a joy and a collaborative process between a student and a teacher. We wanted a school which is part of the European and world space and does not cultivate any parochial pretences to hide behind.

What lessons have you learnt?

I learned that I have to take care of most things myself; I learned to rely on myself and my people. I am lucky to have great co-workers and a great family and friends. In our part of the world, people often expect the state, or some institution, to serve up a solution. But it hardly ever does. It pays to invest your time and energy in what you like to do. In my view, one of the best things that can happen to you is to earn a living doing something you enjoy. And good education improves your starting position in life.

What’s next for you?

Apart from personal life and health, the most important thing for me now is to keep our school going. We have so many interesting projects up and running; it would be a great pity to have to abandon them. These unfortunate times are really tough on us; as a private institution, we depend on tuition fees 100 per cent as we get no funding or contributions from the state.

Although ideal in many ways for studying architecture, this country is not yet open enough to the outside world, which manifests also in its relatively restrictive policy in issuing student visas – which is a big problem for us. But this is still a minor gripe, given the circumstances we are in now. I am confident this will get better. The main thing is to keep going. And after this crisis blows over, I would like more time for my own work. I never completely left it and the combination of my own practice and education is what I imagine is my ideal professional journey.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Don’t be afraid of things. My generation grew up in the 1970s and ’80s; we were told to keep our voice down and to say one thing at home and something else in public. It was schizophrenic. I was afraid of so many things back then: I was afraid of a Third World War – we were haunted by images from Second World War films and the horrors of the imperialist world; I was afraid of teachers … This world disappeared after 1989 as if by magic. But I still sense ghosts of the old fear in me – of authorities, superiors, teachers. Although much less than before, but it is still there. But what really scares me is that this familiar fear is creeping back to post-Communist countries. When you see who is in power here, in Poland, in Hungary etc.

What are you trying to achieve and why?

Multiverse was founded to create a diverse group of future leaders. The one-size-fits-all university model that is being pushed on young people in the UK and elsewhere clearly isn’t working. Firms increasingly find that graduates aren’t ready for work, and many graduates never receive the higher salaries they were promised from their degrees. Despite the huge expansion in university attendance, social mobility has barely increased. Diversity is becoming an existential issue in many companies. It’s clear something has to change. Our response is to create an outstanding alternative to university through apprenticeships. By recruiting diverse talent, delivering world-class training, and giving apprentices a community to support them, we can accelerate careers and set our apprentices up to be leaders in the future.

What’s your business model?

We recruit diverse career starters with talent and determination. We go into hard to reach communities through schools, charities and social organisations to spread the word. Our bespoke matching software is designed to measure character and potential rather than pure academic achievements, which are often a function of how good your school was, not what you can go on to achieve. We then provide world-class training through applied learning, where learning happens alongside work so that new skills are embedded through immediate testing and adaptation. We developed a curriculum incorporating some of the world’s best content, to teach people the skills they need for the digital and tech careers of the future. We use coaching and our unique online platform to give people the skills they need to accelerate their careers, no matter what stage they are at. Finally we have created a community to support our apprentices through socials, mentoring, sports, wellbeing and leadership schemes. It’s designed to exceed the best of the university experience and has been ramped up, remotely, to adjust to the current crisis. Businesses pay to enhance their employees’ skills and the majority of funding comes through the Apprenticeship Levy.

How do you measure success?

We measure success in many different ways. When it comes to career success, 91 per cent of our apprentices report that they earned a promotion or a pay rise over the course of their apprenticeship. Our apprentices are more likely to move on to a positive destination, work or full-time study, than university students. We are driven by social mobility. We work hard to ensure that of those apprentices we place around half are from BAME backgrounds or have received free school meals. Ultimately the most reliable measure of success is whether Multiverse is growing, and able to give more people the benefits of our outstanding alternative to university. It took a huge effort, but when the coronavirus hit we moved online swiftly and kept increasing the number of apprentices we trained.

What lessons have you learnt?

Our two biggest lessons are that you can’t compromise on your mission, or on who you hire. Knowing that we are all driven by a single mission to create a diverse group of future leaders has enabled our team to do amazing things you’d never have thought possible, like moving online without missing or rearranging a single session. For startups in particular making good hires can be existential. Diversity is particularly important, with McKinsey research showing the most diverse companies consistently outperform their competitors. So is finding the right digital and tech talent to anticipate demand. So far, we’ve worked with around 50 architecture, design, construction and property firms to fulfil exactly these needs.

What advice would you give your younger selves?

Don’t go to university out of social pressure. There are some good reasons to go but societal expectation isn’t one of them. There are brilliant careers to be had that don’t start with a degree. It’s more important to focus on an objective, map out your path to get there and don’t let anything knock you off course.