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Embedding sustainable practice and climate literacy within accreditation requirements for education and training programmes

Entry and access to the built environment professional registers, that is qualified professionals, often require the successful completion of a recognised, or accredited, programme. These recognised programmes can underpin the knowledge, skills and/or sometimes behaviours, needed to be qualified built environment professionals.

With a variety of professional qualification registers available, and through a range of educational and competence levels, recognised programmes can consist of, but are not limited to:

Formal qualifications, such as BTECs, City and Guilds, HNCs and HND, NVQs, SVQs etc
Degree programmes, at Bachelors and Masters level
Apprenticeships, including English Apprenticeship Standards, Scottish or Welsh Apprenticeship Frameworks, and
In-company training programmes.

Where professional institutions do carry out the formal recognition, or accreditation, of programmes, there are often:

Boards, committees and panels that formulate and define the curriculum, standards and other requirements against which all accreditation decisions are made in their discipline areas for each professional register;
Standards and guidance in relation to Accreditation, for education and training providers to meet for each professional register; and
Accreditation Panels who carry out the independent review of programmes to ensure they meet the standards and other requirements set by the professional (and regulatory) body.

In many cases, there is also an overarching regulatory body, such as the Architects Registration Board (ARB) or the Engineering Council (EngC) that also set out the minimal criteria for accredited programmes, and regulate the manner in which professional institutions assess, review and confer accredited status to recognised programmes. The promotion of recognised programmes is also regulated to ensure currency and, increasingly, mutual recognition at an international level.

As many stakeholders, and often external quality assurance processes, are involved in education and training, making changes to accreditation requirements can take significant time to implement, with those individuals coming through recognised programmes often only coming to professional qualification review many years down the line.

Making changes to accreditation requirements and processes need to be considered over a significant time period, consideration given to the wider education and skills policies and regulatory requirements in each nation, and the need to support and guide those seeking professional recognition of programmes also considered.

Case Study: Joint Board of Moderators (JBM): Enhancing and embedding sustainable practice and climate literacy within accredited degree programmes

The Joint Board of Moderators (JBM) comprises five professional engineering institutions:

Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE)
The Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE)
The Institute of Highway Engineers (IHE)
Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT)
The Permanent Way Institution (PWI)

In response to, and supported by the Engineering Council’s statutory and five yearly regulatory review of professional standards, these updated engineering wide standards (launched in April 2021) have a greater focus on engineers increasing their competence and achievement of the UN SDGs. Updated guidance around the UN SDGs for engineers was also published by the Engineering Council at the same time.

The Joint Board of Moderators (JBM), combined with the updating of the Engineering Council’s requirements for professional registration and the approval and accreditation of education and training programmes, carried out its own (more specific) review of these standards in relation to engineers and technicians across these five institution discipline areas, combined with a review of the JBM’s approval and accreditation requirements for education, training and degree programmes, during late 2019 and early 2020.

Using the Engineering Council’s five yearly review, JBM took the opportunity to contextualise an engineering-profession wide set of learning outcomes for engineers in the built environment, and to introduce and explain the size of the environmental challenges faced to university degree programme providers; the aim being to enhance and deepen previously mandated, and further embed, sustainable practice and climate literacy requirements within the JBM’s own accreditation guidance and requirements (which exceed the baseline Engineering Council requirements).

Four threads were used throughout the accreditation review, these being:

Design
Sustainability
Professionalism and ethics
Health and safety, and risk management

These areas were chosen to enhance programme content, development and delivery of degree programmes, support high quality programmes through the development of knowledge, skills and professionalism, and to enthuse and empower future graduates to query and question what they could do, and place greater emphasis on social and global challenges.

Revised learning outcomes relating to sustainable practice and climate literacy should now enable graduates to:

Place the global challenges of the climate emergency, the 17 UN SDGs and cultural change central to materials selection, design and construction thinking
Challenge and question a brief, and writing a brief from scratch to demonstrate the embedment of key climate emergency drivers
Conceive solutions to reuse, remodel and recycle our existing infrastructure appropriately, including retrofit and maintenance
Provide a sense of worldliness (to include the needs of both developed and developing countries) and an empathy for all users of designs

Students will also possess the knowledge and understanding to enable them to:

Carry out and embodied-carbon check on a design, and then minimise this carbon footprint while retaining the ley elements of the brief
Know how wasteful or not a design is when rated against carbon footprint and societal benefit

Full requirements are presented in Annex C of the JBMs Guidelines for Developing Degree Programmes.

Revisions to JBM learning outcomes, processes and procedures were approved in February 2020, with a period of 30-months provided before the revisions would be implemented in September 2022. This period would allow universities who were seeking five-year accreditation, or re-accreditation, to review their degree programmes, to ensure they complied with JBM requirements, and to re-validate these programmes in advance of an accreditation review.

This time period also enabled JBM to offer monthly workshops over an 18-month period to support universities to implement change to their programmes of learning, and in particular, changes to the role of industrial advisory boards (IABs) within universities, where they were specifically challenged to make these emerging priorities a focus for programmes, and to reduce other areas of content that was no longer felt necessary or relevent to the same extent.

Concurrently, JBM also carried out its own assessment on how well its accreditation panel and their members were prepared for such changes. In collaboration with Engineers Without Borders, a workshop was carried out and assessors asked to reflect on their own confidence in terms of climate action.

Assessors were also asked to submit questions to the JBM to support them in identifying areas where more support was needed.

Using this collective feedback, a follow up workshop offered assessors a range of evidence-based responses for them to use and enable further independent assessment of degree programme materials.

JBM has also taken to structuring its accreditation panels with an expert in climate emergency and sustainable practice to ensure degree programmes do support and implement change.

Activity 3: Ensuring your institution’s accreditation requirements and recognition of programmes embed sustainable practice and climate literacy

The purpose of this activity is to help your institution to define and embed sustainable practice and climate literacy within accreditation standards and processes, be that for technical or degree level programmes. Your institution should work through the questions below, which will enable your organisation to assess its current position with regards to accreditation criteria, and where the institution might move towards.

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