Kelly Davies is Marketing Manager at SF Planning 

I’d been working in marketing for 25 years, and I didn’t know a thing about town planning until a little over three years ago when I joined SF Planning as their marketing manager. While researching the sector, I can clearly remember thinking, ‘well, it’s a bit like architecture, isn’t it?'

Thanks to the patience of the planners I was surrounded by, I quickly recognised how diverse the role of planning is.

With my background, building meaningful connections is something I know, and community engagement has been an important part of SF Planning’s culture since its foundation. That has placed me well within the organisation to promote the industry.

Getting involved with careers events at local schools made a lot of sense when I joined SF Planning; we’re proud of our outreach work and I felt I could really contribute to it. When I arrived at my first careers fair I was more prepared than I’d expected - as well as a lot of blank looks, a common reply to ‘What do you know about town planning’ was ‘Is it the same as architecture?’

Given my own journey, I could relate to this response and despite not being a planning expert, I found I was comfortable explaining the job to someone outside the industry. But my first experience felt a bit long-winded and, if I’m honest, a bit dry. The students listened politely then quickly moved on to a more engaging stand, and I was left attempting eye contact with the next passing teenager. This led me to think about how I could curate something more engaging.

Careers fairs get interesting

When we were invited to a local 11-18 school it was an opportunity to try something different. The school happens to be the largest in the county, so there was a real challenge of scale to consider too. They were keen for us to be at their annual careers fair, but they wanted interaction; something that would spark curiosity and broaden students’ ideas about the world of work.

Creating a more dynamic experience was something I’d been thinking about for a while. We’d done a lot of careers fairs by this point, but most were similar to that first experience: students drifting past our stand, eyeing up the Haribo and merchandise until they felt obliged to give us 90 seconds to listen to our pitch. I was having handfuls of meaningful conversations with students, but I wanted a way to introduce the sector to bigger groups. We weren’t going to be able to inspire 900 teenagers to become town planners in one afternoon, but it felt important to engage them in a conversation about planning; it’s such a critical factor in how they experience their own community.

Young people are typically really interested in their local area and how they interact with it, although they might not associate that interest with town planning. They experience a far wider range of homes (through friendships), use a variety of transport, and access leisure and infrastructure far more than their parents and grandparents do. We decided that careers events for SF Planning needed to be less about selling a job, and more about a different kind of conversation which would engage them in the role of planning. By introducing planning as a concept and spending less time explaining the mechanics of the role, we could present town planning as an idea and an activity which was important to them all.

Making planning hands on

Instead of focusing on the day-to-day tasks of planning, we shifted to a concept-driven approach. Our setup was simple:

• A stand with a couple of banners
• A quiz: “How well do you know your town?”

We showed photos of local buildings students could recognise and asked questions about their history and purpose. That got them talking. Then came the game changer: LEGO.

We invited students to design their own town. Build anything you like, but think like a planner and consider what the planners before you have already done:

• Are you using space wisely?
• What’s missing?
• What types of homes do people need?
• How will people travel?

Why interaction wins every time

The shift in approach had a notable and successful impact: what historically had been a bit ‘awkward’ became so much more enjoyable for me and (I think) the students. The students chatted about what’s important to them now. How that might change as they get older. They built, adapted, repurposed and regenerated, evolving their town in real-time. The stand was busy all day.

I owe a big thank you to the Bournside School Careers team for being the catalyst to a different way of approaching these events. They know their students, and how best to capture their interest. And they were right: student-focussed, interactive content is the way forward. We’ve changed our approach to careers events as a result, and hopefully these will feed really positively into the wider work of the RTPI around careers and education.