More housing education!

We have a friend who came over for drinks the other night.  They happened to have done a Masters degree in housing at Bristol in the late 1990s when Bristol had its School for Advanced Urban Studies, and that kind of programme.  It was lovely to reminisce about the building where that programme was delivered, and which housed the most amazing library of housing texts.  It was where I wrote my second book, and it has a special place in my heart.  The building is now very expensive flats and houses.  The programme closed down years ago.

I tell that story in part because it tells us something about the retreat of Universities from providing housing-focused degree programmes and/or training.  As I understand it, Cardiff Met have retained their housing programme (but I can’t find it on their website), and certainly have fine scholars who are passionate about housing education (see, for example, here), including environmental health scholars who have made major contributions to thinking about workforce issues.  I could be wrong but that’s it in terms of university provision in Wales.

This is a story replicated across the UK, and one that should be decried.  This is a housing law and policy blog.  If we just focus on those issues, it seems to me to be really hard to do a housing job (at whatever level) without some basic knowledge about the law and policy in housing generally (not just internal policies and practices).  To be able to reflect on one’s job in light of (for example) equalities, care and children Acts would be a desirable attribute of a housing professional alongside other skills that one can teach in a classroom.  The reason for the decline in programmes, as far as I can remember it, is that we were told that there were insufficient student numbers and perhaps insufficient academic staff.

That is a rather lengthy introduction by way of background context to my reading of the recent report of the Chartered Institute of Housing Cymru’s workforce survey, which has been reported this week.  There are some interesting variations depending position in an organization but there is some support for WG mandated qualifications to be put in place as well as a regulatory requirement for staff to be able to access CPD.  This is heartwarming stuff for an educationalist to read, but also concerning because I just wonder about the capacity of the higher education sector to provide the level and quality of training.

Maybe we should be ditching institutional affiliations and providing resources online that are Welsh specific.  I appreciate that the CIH have their own training packages and qualifications, but these are generally for people already in post and it isn’t clear that they offer them with a Wales focus (I’m sure that they do, but my cursory look didn’t find that level of detail).

After all, and this is really the important point pedagogic point: we have a raft of Welsh specific housing law, with at least three potential Bills in this Senedd.  As I never tire of saying, there is some really great and progressive law in Wales of which we should be proud.  But, if people don’t know about it, then it doesn’t matter a jot how progressive it is.  One other context for this on which I was corresponding with somebody the other day is that, at least in England, they draw a distinction between compliance and non-compliance, with those in the former camp regarded as “good” and those in the latter camp regarded as deviant in some way.  However, that binary is really problematic, as the behaviouralists tell us.  What educationalist isn’t for more education?  I just think it is absolutely critical right now to have the best educated housing sector we can.  Otherwise you get into the position like the Kensington Mortgage Company where you seek to evict a tenant under the Housing Act 1988.