Other recommendations
Beneath the headline proposal for Civic Colleges, we make six further recommendations. Some are things colleges would do, others are policies to complement colleges and work alongside them. We see this as a package of complementary measures – powerful on their own, but more so if pursued as part of an overall strategy to revitalise civic life.
1. Fund Centres of Excellence
The problem
There is insufficient support for civic disciplines, whether through professional bodies, research funding, or recognition of the disciplines and their role in the institutions of the state. It is clear from our interviews that most practitioners do not want a top-down edict on what good looks like, but there does seem to be space for centres of expertise.
Recommendation
Government should work with UK Research and Innovation, and the ESRC in particular, to fund a series of Centres of Excellence for emerging civic disciplines, and invite practitioners from the field to propose the scope and makeup of these centres. This strikes a balance between state support and ownership from practitioners themselves. Research could be commissioned to explore the form these centres would take. These institutions, alongside the Civic Colleges, could host a new generation of practice-oriented journals, publishing articles on the frontier of the field. Different disciplines would suit different models of Centres (e.g. some could be hosted in national government, some in local government, and others independent).
2. Support convenings, peer networks and communities of practice
The problem
Much of the learning in civic work is necessarily tacit – hard to write down, but clear when you see it, and best learned by watching someone, and through reflective practice, as opposed to classroom learning. Some of the most valuable development therefore happens through peer learning: practitioners meeting one another, swapping notes, working through hard cases. These networks, however, are often informal, fragile, and dependent on the volunteer time of individuals, and where they exist, they are unevenly resourced. This often leaves practitioner know-how sitting in people’s heads and hands while new practitioners find it hard to break into the field. From our interviews, we find a real hunger from practitioners to connect and learn from each other.
Recommendation
Government and foundations should provide patient, multi-year funding for convenings, peer networks, and communities of practice across civic disciplines. This should focus on supporting the social processes of learning – peer exchange, study visits to places where good work is happening, and support for pioneering centres of practice to host visiting cohorts. Priority could be given to disciplines where peer infrastructure is thin. Some networks could later mature into formal bodies; others would remain useful precisely because they are informal and light-touch. Practitioner networks could become custodians of the civic commons we described above. Civic Colleges could also host these networks.
3. Open a route to more formal recognition for disciplines that want it
The problem
A handful of the disciplines we have mapped are mature enough to sustain a recognised body of their own, with a defined practice, a body of evidence, and an active community of practitioners. But there is currently no clear route by which a civic discipline can develop more formal recognition. While this route is not right for all disciplines, it may well be for some. Not having this option matters because formal recognition supports career progression, public legitimacy, and institutional memory that outlasts individuals. As things stand, the CLD Standards Council Scotland is probably the closest existing model of a professional body for this work anywhere in the UK; it covers Scotland only, and registration with it is voluntary.
Recommendation
Government should signal that, where a civic discipline wants it, it will support a route to formal recognition – whether through royal charter, recognition on the model of the CLD Standards Council, or other appropriate forms. The aim is not to impose this on disciplines that do not want it, or to favour one form over another, but to make clear that the door is open for disciplines that wish to seek more formal recognition.
4. Invest in pathways into the disciplines
The problem
There is no portable framework for entry into or progression across the disciplines of civic renewal, either based on qualifications or experience and skills learned informally. Practitioners often move between roles, but it is hard to demonstrate to employers how skills transfer and layer. Most disciplines have no Level 3 or Level 4 apprenticeship route, and where apprenticeships do exist – such as the Level 3 community health and wellbeing worker standard – they are siloed by sector. The result is that the field is hard to enter from the outside and hard to move around within. Where entry routes exist, they are often short-term and tied to a one-off pot of funding.
Recommendation
Government and major foundations should support the development of clearer pathways into civic disciplines: apprenticeships, conversion routes for mid-career professionals, and recognition of vocational experience and skills learned informally. The goal is to build a portable framework that facilitates movement across related civic roles.
Any such framework should recognise experience as readily as it recognises training; a route that only counts formal teaching as valid would exclude most of the people currently doing this work. The benefits of qualifications (respect, parity with other professions, clear portability) should be balanced with their potential drawbacks (e.g. formalisation, which can squeeze out the more intuitive or dispositional aspects of a discipline). The goal is partly to make these disciplines visible to young people choosing a career, and to those in adjacent fields – teaching, social work, the public services – who want a lateral move.
Civic Colleges would be a natural home for this work, and their integrative character would help to make a portable framework possible.
5. Build complementary civic capability across the public sector
The problem
The work of civic renewal does not sit independent of the state. There are complementary disciplines in government and public services that look out toward communities, and professionals such as policymakers whose decisions and ways of working either hinder or support civic work. Government has more direct purchase here than over the wider civic ecosystem, as the funder or direct employer of these roles. As yet, little direct support is offered to shift ways of working, and there is generally poor ‘civic literacy’ across most disciplines in public service.
Recommendation
Teams leading on capability in the public sector should be more deliberate about supporting civic work. This is partly about spreading civic-friendly disciplines like relational practice, such as by establishing a formally recognised Academy of Relational Practice. It also means building civic literacy into more traditional disciplines, most notably the policy profession, so that policy professionals understand the grammar and affordances of civic work: how it relates to government, how it needs to be funded and evaluated, how it spreads (not via roll outs and replication, but in more organic ways).
Many of the most important of these wider enabling roles sit in local government, or in decentralised systems like the NHS (e.g. people involved in commissioning and procurement). The workforce and improvement bodies that serve these sectors are therefore also responsible for helping to shift culture and mindsets. Civic Colleges could ultimately serve a role here too, welcoming public servants for training to develop their understanding of civic methods, and doing so alongside civic practitioners.
6. Establish administrative infrastructure as shared services
The problem
Civic practitioners spend disproportionate amounts of their time resolving issues related to everything from HR, to legal and compliance issues, to logistics. This is symptomatic of a lack of recognition of these disciplines, which often sees them bundled together with other jobs. It also reflects a lack of funding for the operating costs of small civic organisations, as flagged in Locality’s Community powered neighbourhoods (2025). While there have been some efforts to provide shared services as infrastructure, these offers are patchy.
Recommendation
Major foundations and charity-sector bodies should work together to develop and subsidise shared service models, aiming to free civic practitioners to focus on their core work, while also increasing the quality of these important support functions. This could learn from existing efforts to develop such support, such as the NHS trust in Doncaster that provides HR and legal support to partner organisations. It could mean anchor institutions sharing their support functions and expertise; or it could mean creating and funding sector-wide administrative support infrastructure. Some organisations are already experimenting with these models – Superhighways in London and the UK-wide Cranfield Trust among them – and we could scale and systematise what works.