The UK's students are ready for practice - is practice ready for them?

摘要

Each year the AJ faces the challenge of how - or indeed whether - to rank and establish criteria for the UK's architecture schools. Whatever your thoughts on rankings, and as rewarding as it would be to review work produced by all of the UK's 52 schools (found in this year's directory, page 65), if we are to attempt to snapshot anything by way of trends, some sort of filter needs to be applied.This year we have again turned to the league tables drawn up by The Guardian. But rather than looking at overall results we looked at one figure in particular: that of'employability', calculated by how many respondents report having found a graduate-level job within six months of graduating. This is not due to a desire to resurrect the old debate that students aren't grappling with enough 'real-world' issues these days, or to bemoan student shows not being technical enough - rather, it is a call to look at the relationship between education and practice as less of a conveyor belt and more of an ongoing conversation, in which parameters are shifting and new connections are being forged.