News From Other Organisations: Regional Centres of Excellence welcome Academy for Sustainable Communities

Across the English regions, Centres of Excellence are working to overcome the biggest barrier to the achievement of the sustainable communities' agenda - the severe shortage of people with the right skills who are also able to work across sectoral barriers to make and sustain the communities that we all want.

A national centre has the potential to provide a framework within which the regional centres can progress good practice, career and skills development. Over the coming months the national network of Centres of Excellence will be working closely with the Academy for Sustainable Communities to reach out to the regeneration communities in the regions.

Regional consultation over the autumn proved that there is a demand for the Academy, to lead a national approach across all key interests and work with the innovative programmes and activity beginning to emerge from the Regional Centres of Excellence. These have included masterclasses, learning networks, virtual information sources and graduate placements. Collectively the Regional Centres of Excellence have embraced the breadth of the skills agenda from design and the built environment to community development and are ready to support a similarly wide agenda for the national centre.

Building on their progress to date the Regional Centres of Excellence will be working over the coming months to deliver the following activity which supports the Academy's early programmes:

• master classes and training events to focus on the importance of generic skills and multi-disciplinary working
• visits and workshops around regeneration projects
• promoting good design in the built environment
• pooling information and commissioning new research
• encouraging a new generation to take up careers which will provide the skills needed to achieve sustainable communities

Sophie Churchill, Chief Executive of RegenWM, Centre of Excellence for the West Midlands and representative of the Regional Centres on the Task Group for the National Centre commented, "This is an exciting time for all of us involved in Regional Centres of Excellence. We are all looking forward to working with the new Academy for Sustainable Communities to build on the inspiring work already underway across the English regions to improve regeneration and renewal activity."

Read more about the Regional Centres of Excellence: download report (700Kb PDF)