As life after Covid life slowly trickles into view I hope you and yours are keeping safe and well. As a result of restrictions lifting, we were able in July to have our first in-person Board meeting in 16 months. After so long working remotely it was an absolute delight to get together, and the benefits for productivity and collegiate working were immediately evident. I hope you too are feeling the benefits of being able to reconnect ‘offline’ with colleagues and clients.
At that two-day meeting my colleagues and I had extended, no-holds-barred conversations in pursuit of our 2022-2027 strategy and our business plans for 2022. There is a huge amount to do to make ARB the regulator we want it to be – efficient and cost effective, certainly; to secure the human and IT resources, the processes and systems that will deliver tangible improvements in the ways we interact with you, significant investment is long overdue.
But beyond that there is a vision to catch. The core business of keeping the Register lays on us a duty to ensure that registration has meaning for individual architects and for the public we exist to protect. Good regulation is about education and standards far more than about the headline-grabbing disciplinary action we sometimes take where an individual has fallen short. It is about helping good architects – the overwhelming majority – to become better, indeed to be as good as they can be. We can’t achieve that on our own, but a good regulator has a key part to play.
We’re in the process of engaging stakeholders to help us develop an outcomes-based approach to initial education and training, stimulating new routes into the profession, widening access to it and promoting ethical behaviour, leadership and a focus on sustainability as integral to practice. On a related note, we’re also radically overhauling the way we recognise overseas qualifications to ensure consistency in the ways architects qualified outside the UK can join our register. We will look for parallel benefits for UK-qualified architects who want to work overseas.
We have an opportunity to make real strides in how we regulate and support the profession over the next five years, and I look forward to leading the Board in meeting this challenge. We aim for a profession reflective of our society, which we can facilitate through specific policies as well as designing outcomes from education and training that support more flexible routes in and promote ethical and inclusive behaviour. As you will have read in our Annual Report, there are concerning areas of underrepresentation and we intend to change this. If you would like to talk about how ARB can better support and engage with architects from underrepresented groups, please get in touch.
Since I last wrote to you, the Building Safety Bill has been introduced in Parliament, paving the way for new powers for ARB to monitor architects’ continuing professional development. I know that architects, like all professionals, develop their competence and knowledge throughout their careers. This is a natural part of good professional practice. We will design a system to help formalise and steer what most of you are already doing. We won’t take a one-size-fits all approach, and we do not favour tests and exams for architects in practice. We intend to encourage you to set your own development objectives, aligned with your practice.
This week, ARB publishes guidance for schools on fire and life safety and environmental sustainability, taking effect from September 2021. We understand this may take time to implement and some schools are further on than others. We will work with institutions to afford them the time and space to put in place the necessary resources and quality assurance. However, we do insist that students are taught these critical topics in sufficient detail and schools’ progress on implementing the guidance will be studied as part of our annual monitoring process.
We will share more on all these things later in the year. In the meantime you can stay involved and have the chance to contribute by joining ARB’s Architects Engagement Group. We have enjoyed listening to what you have told us there, and look forward to more.
I wish you a very enjoyable summer spent with family and friends and, as always, I look forward to updating you on our progress over the rest of the year.
Alan Kershaw
Chair
Architects Registration Board
