Chartered Surveyors Training Trust
Terry Watts, CEO, Chartered Surveyors Training Trust
IT was back in 1984, with Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, the economy in the midst of recession, with inflation just below 5% having been to 11% a year earlier, and youth unemployment worryingly high at 19.6%, that the Lord Mayor of London requested worshipful companies to take advantage of the youth training schemes (YTS) to help get young people into good jobs.
The Worshipful Company of Chartered Surveyors, already keen to widen the type of people becoming surveyors, took up this challenge.
What evolved from this initiative was the Chartered Surveyors Training Trust (CSTT), a charity which over the subsequent years supported hundreds, if not thousands of people into surveying.
CSTT shifted its focus to raising the profile of the built environment in schools, signposting candidates to take their next steps into the sector, and to provide support for those facing barriers, in their journey towards becoming surveyors. CSTT ran recruitment programmes, selection days and then went on to provide pastoral care for apprentices through their training programmes.
Primarily, but not exclusively, working with smaller surveying companies, CSTT created a loyal community of alumni now often in senior roles across the profession.
In 2015, the scale and the infrastructure required to support the requirements from government and the fact that provision became much more mainstream, led CSTT trustees to decide to hand over their apprenticeships to the University College of Estate Management (UCEM).
From 2018, CSTT shifted its focus to raising the profile of the built environment in schools, signposting candidates to take their next steps into the sector, and to provide support for those facing barriers, in their journey towards becoming surveyors.
Research
Our research showed that few young people (or schools and teachers in fact) understood the range of careers in the built environment, much less aspired to become surveyors, a fact supported by our first poll of 15-16-year-olds, in which only 6% would consider a career in the sector, rising to 60% after completing My Environment My Future2, our main schools programme. Our polls have been more rigorously tested in YouGov research commission by Deconstruction2 in the summer of 2023 where they interviewed 2,000 people. This research discovered, among other things that:
- 77% of people aged 18-24 would never consider a career in the industry.
- Only 3% of those surveyed thought our sector was important to the future of the country, versus 57% for healthcare.
- 3% thought construction was well paid, when in fact it is second only to financial services.
- 7% of adults would recommend the industry.
Unless there is someone in the family already working as a surveyor, it is unlikely that a young teenager would wake up one day and say, ‘forget YouTube influencer, I want to be a geospatial surveyor when I leave school’. Like it, agree with it or not, surveying in all its forms is seen as construction, and all the negative images that come with that; dirty, unsafe, low skilled.
Affect change
Trustees concluded that promoting surveying, in all its forms, to students with no context of the work of the wider sector was a tall order and so we needed to initially introduce the built environment into schools. Objective were therefore set to affect change for the built environment sector as a whole, and then to catch those who were struggling to progress towards being a surveyor. To that end our charitable objectives are now set to be:
“To provide and promote opportunities for individuals from all backgrounds to enter the surveying profession, including career opportunities in the wider built environment sector. Additional assistance to be offered to those in need who would ordinarily be prevented from accessing education, training and employment.”
The next consideration was reach and like most others looking to reach young people, through our own direct efforts we could only reach a handful of schools – even the largest schools programmes in the sector reach no more than 100 secondary schools.
While 100 schools is an admirable achievement given the complexity of working with schools, there are 4,178 secondary schools in the UK. Setting out to reach 2.4% of young people with our exciting message about a sector that needs at least 11% of them seems like setting out to fail.
Tools
CSTT’s model is therefore to enlist the support of those thousands of professionals in the built environment who are asked to visit schools and represent the sector. Everything we do is to provide tools that facilitate people and organisations in the sector, they are after all best equipped to affect change, and have a passion to excite others about it. My Environment My Future (MEMF) was born of this mission.
Of the 572 teachers so far registered to use MEMF many have been asked to run the after-school green, climate change or net zero club that most schools now run, and they asked if we could help. We set ourselves up by explaining that 42% of all human produce greenhouse gases come from the built environment, and to tackle that you could do a lot worse than joining the sector and the efforts being made to improve it.
Now we provide workshop materials that enable teachers, or 6th formers, to facilitate the afterschool clubs. These encourage the students to take action and some schools are using them to develop their sustainability plans, one local authority is even considering funding the students plans for improving their built environment.
The trustees are eager to expand our work on sustainability, and we have plans to expand our content considerably; if anyone would like to help, we’d love to hear from you.
Raising the profile
Raising the profile of the built environment is a great start, and we aim to provide a funnel of interest that either CSTT or its partner organisations can help take to the next stage; and we partner with anyone, there is no competition for access to young people in our view.
Addressing the lack of diversity in the surveying profession means bringing people from less advantaged or from minority groups. In turn that requires employers to be open to alternative pools from which they will recruit.The next step is to advise on the many and various routes into surveying, then help relevant students and potential employers to understand apprenticeships.
For CSTT this includes giving bursaries for courses that provide access to apprenticeships in surveying, and fund testing for those thought to be suffering from ADHD or dyslexia. All that means a re-vamp of our website, which is underway.
Addressing the lack of diversity in the surveying profession means bringing people from less advantaged or from minority groups. In turn that requires employers to be open to alternative pools from which they will recruit, and to make sure that their internal culture and processes are welcoming to different people. The CSTT directly, or through its partners, is ready to help with understanding of, and the creation of plans to overcome any barriers in this arena.
Forming partnerships to address problems, or affect change in a sector as large and complex as the built environment is logical, but actually getting organisations to partner in meaningful ways is hard. In the area of schools and young people engagement it is particularly hard for two primary reasons:
- Schools are stretched and busy places. They are sensitive to people trying to sell them things and don’t have time to waste. If like CSTT you have a number of schools engaged you don’t want them taken away by a different activity. For CSTT our activity is uniquely delivered through the curriculum, is free and we rely on high quality more intensive activities to follow on after we have done our bit.
- It costs to engage with schools and run programmes. Most activity requires someone to visit and for most people engaging with schools there is a cost to each engagement. That is why CSTT designed its programmes to scale by creating mechanisms whereby the professionals in the sector can champion CSTT activity with no training and at no cost. Our next 572 teachers or schools will cost no more to support. This also means you don’t need to wait for the next round of project funding to come along... start today.
A huge step forward for CSTT has been our MoU with the CICES, who have been the first professional body to sign up, having seen the bigger picture and recognise that we aren’t competing in schools. It is not a zero sum game, but by working together we can create the much needed funnel of interest in careers in the built environment interested candidates will then find their way. The CSTT is really looking forward to forming a close relationship with CICES and its members. If you want to know more get in touch.
Terry Watts, CEO, Chartered Surveyors Training Trust
---
2 www.thisisdeconstruction.com