The Architects Registration Board’s commission on the future of professional practice experience for architecture students has issued its findings. Their aims are laudable, but questions remain around implementing them, writes Alex Wright
After a little over a year of work, the Architects Registration Board (ARB)’s Professional Practical Experience Commission (PPEC) has published its findings on the future of professional training for students of architecture.
Its recommendations have been keenly awaited by schools of architecture, as the missing part in the ARB’s reformed regulatory framework for qualification as an architect in the UK.
At the time the ARB announced the reforms to the longstanding Part 1,2 and 3 structure of education, it appeared as though the thorny question of professional practice had been side-stepped. For a long time it has proved difficult to find a way to effectively regulate PPE and during the recent reforms it appeared to have been placed reluctantly in the 'too tricky to do' pile by the ARB.
Instead, the decision was taken to hand the problem to an independent commission. Four commissioners were appointed: Chris Husbands (lay chair), Felicity Atekpe (architect academic), Polly Mackenzie (lay member) and Peter Barker (employer of architects). The headline recommendations have been accepted by the ARB board, which is now considering the more detailed recommendations. Those to be taken forward will be shared in the summer.
The commission’s initial findings were unsurprising to many in the sector. The quality of PPE students experience is highly variable in quality, outcomes and the support provided. There are very worrying indications of inequality in pay and access to employment based on gender and race. Finding employment opportunities favours students with networks in the industry, and opportunities are unevenly spread geographically.
Overall, the PPEC concluded that there was an overwhelming case for systemic change, with the ARB, education providers and employers all needing to act together to bring about improvements to better support 'trainee architects'.
Few, if any, would dissent from the commission’s aims, but how to best achieve them?
No easy options on regulating professional practice experience
The commission’s recommendations with respect to the ARB are largely technical revisions to the existing requirements and are aimed at allowing more flexibility in course design and focusing on assuring competency at the point of registration. Apart from the need to revise the Architects Act to allow for the term 'trainee architect' to be lawful, nothing in this section appears too problematic.
The headline outcome in the recommendations for schools of architecture (or Higher Education providers in the nomenclature of the report) is the proposed new 'coordinating' role to be required of them. This is a key recommendation of the commission in response to the question as to who should be responsible for ensuring an improved experience for trainee architects, and this is where the thorniness of the problem draws first blood.
The commission is effectively recommending increased regulation of professional practice experience. But the costs associated with increasing its regulation can only be funded from four sources, with no option being attractive.
Whereas the government financially supports professional practice experience in some professions, there appears consensus that the chances of the taxpayer helping to fund such experience for architects are vanishingly small. Architectural practices support the apprentice system through the apprenticeship levy, and contribute to PPE through mentoring, Part 3 support and by paying student architects.
The profession is operating in a fiercely competitive environment, not least with other disciplines, and there appears little appetite to burden practices with the additional cost of regulating PPE. There is keen awareness of the debt students typically assume in qualifying as architects and there appears no wish to require students to increase this to pay for the regulation of their PPE.
The final option is the one which the commission has recommended. The coordination role required to improve PPE should be carried out by schools of architecture. The actual costs are subject to debate, but what is not in debate is that higher education (HE) is already in a deeper than usual financial crisis.
The Office for Students projects that 72 per cent of HE providers will be running a deficit in 2025-26 and that by that time 40 per cent will be surviving by balancing cash flows month to month. Schools currently lose about £4,000 a year for each undergraduate home student they teach.
The PPEC’s suggestion that HE providers offer more oversight was an entirely predictable one. In short, it is a regulatory question more than a financial one. PPE is provided by practices, but ARB does not regulate practices, only individual architects. Regulating architectural practices would therefore seem impossible without statutory change. It should also be remembered that students can currently gain qualifying PPE employment with firms other than architects.
However, through accreditation the ARB does regulate schools, so the commission has logically identified that the ARB can regulate PPE via the schools. Yet this overlooks two of very important questions. First, would schools want to do it? And secondly, how could they do it?
Risk versus reward
The report states that the commission envisages that the old three-part structure of education will be replaced by a two-part structure, consisting of an undergraduate degree (not ARB-accredited) followed by a single graduate qualification that includes all the academic and practice outcomes (including PPE). This may happen, but it equally well may not.
Universities may take a look at the risk and reward associated with the coordination of professional practice experience and the assessment of the practice outcomes (broadly, the old Part 3) and decide that there is little reward to be had, and an awful lot of risk. It’s quite possible that schools may decide to only deliver the academic qualifications (undergraduate degrees in architecture and MArch degrees as two-year courses or as integrated masters). This is, after all, their core business. None of the PPEC’s other recommendations would appear to prevent this approach, and in the current financial environment for universities, it could appear the preferable route to take from the perspective of higher education institutions.
This leads to the second question: how could schools effectively coordinate all PPE? A significant amount of PPE occurs when trainee architects aren’t registered with any HE provider; definitively they aren’t students, they are employees. In these instances the schools’ role can only be to prepare the student for work, as is already required in the ARB’s standards.
Perhaps to overcome this problem, the commission recommends the ARB encourage schools to submit new qualifications which cover both the academic and practice outcomes. However, its not the ARB’s role to encourage the development of specific types of courses, and for very good reason. The sort of course which is being envisaged may suit some schools, but it would be entirely unsuitable for some others.
This is partly due to the particular risks around delivering courses with integrated placements. At any time when, through no fault of the school, jobs are not available, the placement model can quickly lose its appeal, as either the student has to suspend their studies, or move to a non-placement route. In this scenario, meeting the practice outcomes would be either indefinitely delayed, or impossible.
Currently the HE system is shedding activities that are a financial drain as quickly as it can. There is no desire to take on roles which are not financially self-sustaining.
Oversight of PPE is relatively costly, time consuming and not the core business for higher education institutions. If a school does decide to deliver qualifications which require it fulfil the commission’s recommended coordinating role, it is likely the cost will either be passed on to students, or other aspects of the student offer will be cut to compensate.
Increasing the costs to overseas students is less politically sensitive, and the costs may be passed on directly, if it was thought the market could support the increase. For home students, who are subject to the annual tuition fee cap, other mechanisms may have to be used to try and cover costs.
This will inevitably mean cutting some other aspect of the students’ education, or in some cases universities may simply choose to withdraw their course. It is possible that the existing range of Part 3 courses, which are offered throughout the country, sometimes in small cohorts, will evolve into a far smaller range of options centred in our large metropolitan cities.
Moving the professional practice experience debate forward
The commission’s recommendations for practice include the introduction of mandatory training in mentorship and a code of conduct revision to ensure support for trainee architects. Although important, these changes don’t address the key problems practices face in supporting the next generation of architects: how to afford better levels of pay, and how to ensure there are sufficient training opportunities to meet the demand.
It is not clear it will improve pay; as the PPEC highlights students on placements are not even subject to minimum wage requirements. The report acknowledges these questions to some extent, but also includes some rather surprising statements.
For example, the assertion that 'higher pay will generate higher productivity' begs the question as to why the UK doesn’t solve its moribund productivity problem by simply paying everyone more. This may ungenerously highlight a single clause, in a generally well-written report, but equally questionable is the suggestion that university employees should 'supervise' students’ work in practice. Hopefully this too was just a drafting slip, since it seems highly unlikely that any university would accept such a responsibility.
PPE is a fiendishly difficult subject to tackle. We are not in pursuit of the perfect system, but are, at best, searching to adopt the least imperfect one.
If a consequence of these reforms is that the quantum of professional practice experience opportunities available to students is reduced, then who is likely to bear the impact? Experience suggests it is unlikely to be the well connected, or externally supported student, but may rather be just the sort of student that the commission highlights as being currently already most disadvantaged.
There is much to be commended in this report, but the acid test will be whether its recommendations will, overall, make the pathway to the profession better for the next generation. The commission was given a tough brief in advising the ARB, and its members deserve thanks for advancing a debate which has been delayed for too long.
The aims they have set out are laudable, but questions remain about how they might best be achieved. As Cicero put it, at about the same time the future of architectural education was first being discussed, 'advice is judged by results, not by intention'.
Professor Alex Wright is head of architecture at the University of Bath
Read the Professional Practice Experience Commission’s report in full