The first step

My introduction to the Academy’s foundation degree in sustainable communities has so far been gentle. This is something I am definitely not complaining about – especially considering I haven’t been in formal education for about a decade and this is my first degree course. Going back to school at 32 will take some getting used to I think.

However, I’m under no illusions. I recognise that this is just the beginning and I fully expect things to shift up a gear very soon.

My first impressions of the course at Northumbria are good. First there’s all the new ways of working to get used to. These include fairly alien concepts like academic referencing – designed among other things to prevent plagiarism I’m told. And then there’s the university way of setting out reports and assignments. All very new, but not too difficult to get your head around.

There seems to be plenty of support we can access if we are not sure – though I suspect the proof of the pudding will come when I submit my first assignment. Then I think I will get some sense of what sort of feedback and direction I can expect.

And despite that gentle introduction, the first assignments are looming already. We’ve been told the ‘nature’ of them so far and set off to begin research and background reading. We will be told what our actual task is at our next session in mid-November.

At least one these assignments will hopefully give me a chance to examine the nature of sustainable communities close to home. That’s the West Coast of Cumbria; not an area usually associated with regeneration and deprivation (most people think it’s close to the Lake District and therefore it must be affluent). The assignment will involve assessing the impact of a specific policy intervention (eg Sure Start) in a particular ward, in this case Flimby near Workington where I live.

I’ll let you know my conclusions, but already I am excited that the course seems to be fulfilling some of my hopes and aspirations.

Perhaps I should set out what these are.

Firstly, I’ve taken this course because I hope it will help me in my current role – as a programme development officer for the Rural Development Programme for England. I’m employed by the North West Development Agency, and my task is to monitor projects funded by the programme, and make sure they are spending their money as they should do. These projects are wide ranging but have a general focus on improving the sustainability and competitiveness of the rural economy.

Out here in Cumbria we have an urban regeneration company, West Lakes Renaissance, but if you don’t work in regeneration these terms tend to pass you by and it’s hard to understand how it all fits together. That’s what I hope this course will give me. Already we’ve been widening the net, learning more about things such as New Deal for Communities, something which doesn’t necessarily impact on my work but it all helps put things into perspective.

Understanding which policy interventions have worked and which haven’t – and why they have and haven’t worked – is going to be invaluable. I can envisage a day when I’ll be able to go into a work meeting and say, “well, something like this has happened before, and this is why it did or didn’t work, and these were the lessons learned”. That’s exciting.

Ultimately, I’m here to improve my skills set (in the light of the Egan Review I may not be alone in this aspiration). Generic skills, particularly project management skills, are top of my list. In the long-term I hope this will enable me to take the next step up – into project management roles. As the old saying goes, every journey begins with a first step…

This is the first blog from David Campbell in a series about the Academy’s foundation degree.