A radical digital syllabus for primary education in Wales
I recently undertook some training on futures thinking. I was struck by the following statement about how to consider ‘futures’:
Start with where you want to be, not where you’re coming from.
The basis of this post is the sort of skills and confidence that I would like my children to possess within the digital space. And the digital head-start I want to see for my own children, I’d also like for every child in Wales ♥️🏴.
I want kids to feel comfortable in an increasingly digital world; to understand the concepts that underpin the systems we use every day; and to question established ways of doing things.
I know next to nothing about formal education, but I’m passionate about digital, and particularly about equity in digital. I believe that open source software can be an astonishingly powerful ‘leveler’ for those who lack access to financial or hardware resources. (Hint – that’s many tens of thousands of children in Wales, and it’s billions across the world).
Why open source? Well – it’s free from licensing or restrictions, so there are no financial implications from using it. The code is also open, which means that learners and teachers can play with the code. In the Welsh context, I think this means better learning outcomes, as well as the potential to translate any open source tools or platforms into Welsh. Neat!
Within the European context, Wales is a poor country within a unitary state that seems to be getting poorer by the year. We don’t have the luxury of being able to throw limitless cash at our education system. While I’m certainly not advocating short-changing the sector, I do feel that embracing open source software and learning does give us the opportunity to radically change our approach for low cost and positive outcomes.
Once we accept that premise, the next logical step – specifically when considering our approach to education and digital/tech – is to embrace open source software at all stages of education. And why not start with primary school?
My influence in this sector is pretty minimal. Yes, I sit on the Welsh Government ‘Equity in STEM Board‘, but I’m not an educationalist. In reality my influence is limited mostly to how I can support my own children in their understanding of digital tools and techniques.
And that’s what brings me to the focus of this post; how can I best support the learning of my own children; and what could that lead me to suggest for others?
The current approach
Before I describe my own manifesto, I want to be clear that this isn’t a criticism in any way about how tech is currently being taught in primary schools.
Educators can’t possibly be specialists in every topic, and it’s only by luck of my own career path, intense curiosity, and suggestions from others, that I’ve learnt as much as I have.
However I believe that everything I describe here is implementable within any small educational establishment anywhere in Wales. I’d like to describe the possible, in the hope that somebody is interested in discussing what it would take to pilot the ideas, or to take them and run with them in a different form.
Step 0: Reusing old hardware by installing Linux
Before going any further, I should let you know what hardware my kids are using. They’re both on laptops that are reasonably old – nearly ten years in one case, and nearly fifteen years in the other.
A windows installation on either would render them more or less unusable. However a 10-minute process is all that’s needed to pop a linux distro onto them.
An additional bonus of using Linux is that they are already ready to question why they should use windows or other systems.
The first thing I’m expecting of my own kids is to be able to touchtype. Nothing radical about that perhaps, but I’m directing them towards the Dvorak keyboard.
It’s entirely possible that tech advances will render the keyboard obsolete in the next decade or two; but still, in the interim, I am keen to maintain healthy and pain-free hands, wrists and arms for my children. If there’s no downside to Dvorak touchtyping, and a possible upside with reduced health problems in future, why not?
An additional bonus of this approach is to imbue in young minds the understanding that it can be a benefit to do things in a way that’s different to the dominant way of doing things.
Step 2: Logseq
I’ve had it with linear documents. We generate documents that have to be read top to bottom; we make notes on them that go into other linear documents that we then forget about….it’s not how our brains work.
That’s why I love tools like Logseq. It enables notes and journals to be taken that are then linked to existing knowledge, allowing the creation of incredible knowledge graphs.
How hard is it to use? Well, one of my children started using it when they were seven, so if you’re able to read this blog post, it’s not beyond you either!
My personal Logseq knowledge graph. Each blob represents a person, organisation or concept, and the lines are the links between them.
I’ve found Logseq an invaluable tool to support managing meetings, research, information….my top tip for productivity in fact! I wish it had been available for me when I was in primary school.
I think the use of this tool can help with learning to learn; with making connections between concepts, people and personal experiences.
Step 3: WordPress website
Noting that my kids are still at step 1 or 2, and that all the rest of these ideas have yet to be tested, my third step would be to spin up a WordPress website.
(I would get them to install on a subdomain via cpanel on my existing shared server, but for most people I understand this would be a stretch. That’s why I would recommend using Pikapods (or another one-click installer) to do the heavy lifting for you.)
For just over £1/month, you can have your own WordPress blog and website to play around with. A great way to experiment with themes and blogging – and more important still, to have the conversation about what’s appropriate to publish.
Step 4: Minecraft server? Video production? Animation?
Once my children have got the basics of Linux, touchtyping and web publishing, I would be guided by their own interests. I hear that Minecraft is a popular platform and is used in existing education settings. Why not download and install on a raspberry pi on an online server?
An image generated by the open source Blender package
By this stage, I would hope that they are starting to take their education in their own directions. I think some of the most powerful educational motivators are curiosity and success, along with support and guidance. By taking these steps, they will already have glimpsed some of the possibilities of the digital world, empowering them with the confidence to ask their own questions and set their own challenges
Where does Wales want to be?
I started this blog post with a provocation; where do we want to be? What we want for the children of Wales will be what decides their future – and the future of Wales itself.
I’d like to see our education system truly reflect the ideals of the Future Generations Act. Let’s embrace open source as part of our education, and give young people the best possible start 🧒👧👦🧠✊🏴
I was intrigued and delighted to see that a company is holding a social media conference for Wales. I’m a big fan of skilling-up in Wales, and a big fan of digital media. So, naturally, I offered my services for extolling the benefits of open source social media.
I got a thumbs-up on my comment from one of the organisers; though I haven’t yet been approached for my pitch. That’s fine – it’s not my event. But, looking at the existing programme, I can’t help feel as though the organisers have a bit of a blind spot – philosophically – about the downside of traditional social media.
There’s plenty in there for people who think business as usual – surveillance capitalism etc – is the right path to be following. I mean….if your business model is based on propping up the tech giants, I can understand that.
But I see very little there to speak to people who might value a different approach. To take one example – the session on how to maximise the benefits of ‘paid social (advertising) – appears to take as read that it’s a good thing.
One might equally challenge why public bodies in Wales are spending our money to compete with other users in a web of algorithms set up by private sector companies based overseas and likely not paying much in the way of tax in the UK. Particularly when open-source, ethical, ‘hate-free’ alternatives already exist; I’m thinking mostly of Mastodon and Pixelfed but there’s a myriad of others.
The landing page for the Pixelfed website.
Without wanting to repeat stuff I’ve posted earlier, the open source social media platforms are largely interconnected. That means that if you post something on Mastodon, you can also see it on Pixelfed. This functionality greatly increases the reach and longevity of your communications.
They also – mostly – ban hate speech, which means that your experience on these platforms will probably be more pleasant than on Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok.
The lack of paid mechanisms to increase your profile (or your organisation’s profile) can appear to be a headache for social media managers. But the Fediverse rewards organisations that take a long-term approach to building relationships, and as there’s no paid advertising, there’s no short-cuts. Which rewards all the more the people who are engaging in genuine, meaningful and valuable ways.
I would love to see Wales become a leader in open source social media. I feel as though I’m making some slight inroads, partly helped by the Twitter bin-fire, but we are a long way off a true plurality.
Here’s my offer to the event organisers; you book me for a slot, and I’ll deliver a presentation for you. The title? “Why you shouldn’t come to this conference”.
Best wishes to the organisers, and I confidently look forward to hearing from you about my offer.
This morning it rained in Cardiff. A decent soaking. ‘Big deal’ you might think, but it’s been both (unseasonably) hot and dry for about a month.
Hot and dry enough for small plants and grasses to have dried out, and for serious watering to be needed for most gardens.
Hot and dry enough to make sleeping more of a challenge than normal. The temperature downstairs in my terraced house in Cardiff has been around 24°C, and that’s with me making my best efforts at shading on both sides of the house.
It’s not just me that’s attempting to deal with the heat; a walk around Treganna demonstrates that quite a few households are choosing to use portable air conditioners to deal with night-time heat. The tell-tale is the ducting that dangles out from upstairs windows.
This is a simple and fairly instant remedy for the issue, though not without consequences. It means buying more ‘stuff’, using more electricity, generating more waste, and (presumably) an impact on noise levels in the room.
This issue is going to become considerably greater in future, as Wales becomes drier, wetter and hotter, although not all at the same time.
Urban areas are particularly affected by heating, because man-made surface tend to absorb more heat than natural surfaces, storing it up to create banks of heat that release gradually; fine if the next day is cool, but a big problem if the heat persists. There’s a handy postcode checker from the BBC that tells you how likely your area is to be affected by extreme heat.
What the postcode checker or the BBC article *doesn’t* make clear is that natural solutions can also be applied at the granular level. If you’re fortunate enough to have a garden, you can do a lot to reduce the heat in the summer.
Fruit trees and climbing plants are particularly helpful in this regard. In my experiment the other day, the shade temperature without the benefit of plants was 31°C, and in the cover of plants on the same wall was 24°C.
This isn’t some sort of secret knowledge, but sadly it also doesn’t seem to be high up in the public discourse.
It’s a shame, as there are multiple benefits from using plants to provide shade; generally they are attractive, they form part of a habitat network, and the flowers and fruits are beautiful (and tasty). The mere fact of having plants within line of sight improves well-being and mental health.
How can we enable, empower and support citizens in benefiting from these amazing benefits? In reality, my modest efforts would need to be replicated tens of thousands of times around Cardiff, and hundreds of thousands around Wales.
Creating water?
Of course, if we’re to create this wonderful green infrastructure, we need to be able to keep it alive in these times of low rainfall.
My approach to harvesting water is two-fold:
As many waterbutts as your family will allow you to have, plumbed directly into the downpipes of gutters, and;
Grey-water harvesting (this won’t suit most people)
These two relatively straightforward changes to your domestic infrastructure are low-cost and easy to implement – though many people unfamiliar with simple DIY skills may need support (see below).
There are multiple benefits to water harvesting. Less water ends up in the gutter, reducing the likelihood of Combined Sewer (or storm) Overflows. In principle it should reduce your water bill.
And it reduces your need to take more water from the tap (further reducing your bill and the associated greenhouse gases and pollutants associated with the water purification and delivery system).
It also means you can be quite profligate with water use if you have, as in my case, plenty of thirst fruit trees and grapevines, and children who love picking fruit!
The grey-water side won’t suit most people as there is a particular bouquet associated with using the water that’s produced; however if you’re happy to get up early in the morning (or late at night) to do the watering, the smell is gone within 5-10 minutes, and you have even more water for your plants; it’s more or less inexhaustible even in drought.
I’m just one person making a small difference, although the difference is large to my family. How to replicate this across Cardiff and Wales?
I think that a pilot project, using some of our excellent charities and third sector bodies, to support, empower and encourage people to integrate these simple, practical and effective tools for long-term shading and biodiversity improvement would be a winner. I would be happy to help put a proposal together in partnership with others. Who’s with me?
I have been bullied in two jobs during a career that has spanned more than twenty years and through a wide range of different organisations.
Pretty good odds, you might think. But those two episodes, totalling around three years, were devastating for my emotional and mental health, and were the two unhappiest periods of my life.
In 2010 I worked at the European Environment Agency, a brilliant organisation although not without its flaws. I was very grateful for being ‘required’ to undertake anti-bullying and anti-harassment training there. It used to be (maybe still is) a requirement for all staff, repeated every two years.
Initially sceptical, I was increasingly drawn into the training that described that, although bullying can happen to anybody, and in any direction (i.e. bosses bullying more junior staff, and even bosses being bullied by junior staff), in general there are certain characteristics that seem to be identified in people who are bullied.
My memory of the training may not be perfect, but my takeaway was that you are more likely to be bullied if:
You are a high performer
You choose unorthodox methods to deliver outputs
You go way above and beyond your remit
You break silos
Feedback I’ve received from other people who have also experienced bullying aligns with this recollection of qualities that are targeted.
One of the statistics that I remember being astonished by, was that in the experience of the training providers, on average around 2-3% of any organisation staff cohort is a bully. This was greeted with amazement by those in the training with me; one participant said:
“So you’re telling me that there are more than five bullies in this organisation?”
The trainer responded elegantly:
“I’m saying that if there are no bullies here, it would be the first example in decades of our experience for an organisation of this size.”
The sad truth is that no organisation, be it public, private or third sector, can consider itself immune from this malady. In my own experience, and to add insult to injury, both the people who bullied me were promoted shortly after I left the organisations, even though the institutions were well aware of my complaints about the way I had been treated.
Even more ironic, one of my bullies was an active participant in the #MeToo campaign at the same time as making my professional life miserable. I guess their outrage didn’t extend as far as an introspective.
Sadly it seems that some organisations devote themselves far more to protecting how they are perceived, and the existing power structures within them, than to supporting people who are experiencing intolerable and unjustified maltreatment.
I’m not an expert on this subject; I can only speak from my own personal experience. But if your ‘spider sense’ starts tingling that something’s not right with how you’re being treated; when you deliver outstanding work but it’s always wrong in some way; when people seem to be going out of their way to try to find things you’re doing incorrectly or wrong (laughably they couldn’t in my case, but that didn’t stop them trying, which was its own form of professional impugnation); then you may be being targeted by a bully.
And again, I can only speak from my own experience, but the outcome of a process of complaints, formal or informal processes; these pile on the personal stress and are not guaranteed to result in any significant change in the relationship or the behaviour.
I found the only way to deal with the issue was to leave the organisations in question. This was a positive thing, as it provided me with a focus for my attention rather than ruminating endlessly on ‘why’, and it empowered me in an environment where I had become very disempowered.
All this is why I felt both sad and proud of my twin brother, Gareth, when he spoke out about being bullied when he worked as Chief Executive of Plaid Cymru. Sad because it’s such a destructive thing to experience; and proud that he could speak out about it, because it has given heart to others who may have thought that their own experiences were unique.
The comments on his post from other people demonstrate that it’s a widespread issue that corrodes and degrades people and performance across all sectors of society.
This is because we believe – and the evidence supports our view – that a cooperative and co-production approach provides bigger overall benefits to society than a purely commercial economy.
Our first White Paper outlined the potential for Wales that could accrue from supporting open source.
In practising what we preach, we have embraced two open-source social media platforms; Mastodon (like an open-source version of Twitter), and Pixelfed (similar to Instagram but free and open source).
Afallen Partner David Clubb has been a moderator on Toot.Wales, the Welsh instance of Mastodon, since 2018, and is now on the governing body.
If you would like to find out more about the benefits of an open-source approach to your organisation’s operations and communications, you can get in touch with David via email, or of course, via Mastodon on Toot.Wales!
Culture has a uniquely defined place within Wales’ statute, being defined as one of the Well-being Goals within the Well-being of Future Generations Act [1]:
A Wales of Vibrant Culture and Thriving Welsh Language: A society that promotes and protects culture, heritage and the Welsh language, and which encourages people to participate in the arts, and sports and recreation [2]
Nature is also embedded within the same legislation, although somewhat more nuanced; I read the two goals of a Resilient Wales and a Globally Responsible Wales as having significant weight for the protection and enhancement of our natural environment.
Both culture and nature are interconnected with every other Future Generations Goal. Enhancing both improves the ability of Wales to achieve the ultimate goal of well-being for all our citizens.
So far, so positive. However, the difficulty with policy is, as usual, in the implementation. Although public sector bodies are obliged to report on their progress against sustainable development and the Well-being Objectives [3] there are doubtless numerous challenges in undertaking this assessment, not least because some things, such as the value of culture and nature, are so hard to quantify.
The Well-being of Future Generations guidance gives a potential ‘loophole’ for those public bodies that are unable to – say – achieve significant progress in promoting culture and nature, because the requirement to take ‘all reasonable steps’ to deliver progress is a fairly subjective approach. An entirely legitimate strategy to deliver against public sector obligations could therefore include strong progress against ‘hard’ goals or objectives such as ‘prosperity’, ‘equality’ or ‘health’, all of which can be measured to a reasonably objective standard; and less progress against more challenging goals such as culture.
I make this point for purely illustrative purposes; I have no reason to believe that any public sector body in Wales takes a cynical approach to their obligations. However I think the illustration is useful because it highlights that the ‘measurability’ of objectives or goals is also a lever with which progress can be mandated. Galileo Galilei’s aphorism of five hundred years ago is still relevant today:
“Measure what is measurable; make measurable what is not so”.
Culture is hard to define and considerably harder to measure. Building on the thoughts of others, and in particular on UNESCO definitions [5], I have created a mind map that attempts to contain cultural sectors that could – in principle – be valued to help us understand impact.
The Cultural economy as defined by Afallen. Note that this economic sector is just one component of a ‘five economies’ model that we are developing that includes a Just economy, a Foundational economy, a Planetary Health economy and a Well-being economy. The well-being indicators [6] are highlighted in yellow; the Welsh TOMs [7] components are highlighted in purple.
Even with the work of reputable organisations that try to support the valuation of socially valuable contributions, such as the National Social Value Framework for Wales [7], very few of the cultural components within our cultural economy mind map have a monetary value associated with them.
This is despite the fact that, as with nature, culture provides extraordinary benefits to health and well-being that far exceed the investment needed to allow culture to flourish.
An example particularly pertinent to Wales is the value of the Welsh language. Derided for centuries as an irrelevance or worse by some, the Welsh language is now being rightly cherished as a wonderful community and social asset in its own right. Furthermore there is now a mountain of peer-reviewed evidence demonstrating that bilingualism offers a whole host of benefits to health, educational attainment and well-being.
A systems map demonstrating some of the benefits of the Welsh language to a range of socio-economic and well-being outcomes [8]
If it’s true that bilingualism offers so many benefits, how can we evidence this in a way that increases the perceived value of the Welsh language to public and private sector organisations in Wales. And the bigger question; if some of these benefits also arise for other cultural aspects, how can the cultural sector as a whole improve the evidence base for outcomes that benefit every one of us? For example, how can we ‘reward’ culture and society for playing a crucial role in mitigating the loneliness and isolation that occurred during the pandemic lockdowns? How do we value the interventions that reduce the future burden of mental health on our health services and on society more generally?
I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I do have some ideas about things that may help guide us.
Carry out a project to collate the peer-reviewed evidence on the benefits of bilingualism, and to try to develop a metric for assessing the value of different interventions to support or facilitate the use of Welsh language. This could be done in partnership with established ‘social value’ organisations, or as a stand-alone
Take the latest evidence from international bodies such as the G20 [9], UNESCO [10] and the OECD [11] that carry out work to examine the accounting of cultural value, and use the best international practices in cultural accounting to supplement existing frameworks in Wales
Incorporate the outcomes of the above two projects into the Future Generations guidance to support public sector bodies in understanding and appropriately valuing their contributions to culture, and therefore wider society, economy and well-being
In a previous life, I worked at the European Environment Agency, an organisation which helped translate science into policy. I was part of a fierce internal debate about the merits of trying to assign a value to nature and ecosystem services, and at the time I was convinced that we needed to engage with the world of ‘accounting’ (in its most general sense) in order to make the case for valuing nature more highly.
Notwithstanding that myself and a colleague were able to demonstrate the staggeringly powerful impacts of the Montreal Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, as well as showing the terrible price paid for the use of lead in petrol [12], I now believe that I was wrong. Attempting to value nature, and ecosystem services, feels as though it is a trap laid by an extractive system that attempts to create a framework of worth against which everything can be bought and sold.
But the value of a tree, a woodland, a river, an ant colony; these things have intrinsic worth, and the myriad of inter-relationships between them and the rest of the ecosystem (and hence to human society) are truly impossible to calculate. We know that experiencing nature, even in the most ephemeral ways, improves physical and mental well-being [13][14], so there must be an ‘in principle’ metric that enables us to value the reduced need for medical intervention, that would enable us to argue more effectively for increased green space.
My contention is that, due to an inefficient understanding or methodological approach, we will always be playing ‘catch up’ on the valuation of our natural resources. This raises the risk of ‘playing the game’ of an accounting system that systematically undervalues nature, so that decisions continue to be made that jeopardise Wales’ ability to provide well-being to its citizens..
I think the same argument can be made about attempts to assess the economic value of culture. In doing so, we run the risk of reducing the argument for a strong and thriving cultural sector to a game of numbers, where winners and losers are apportioned according to their ability to navigate different accounting systems.
And yet; decisions are made within frameworks that use accounting to apportion effort and resource. If we resile from making arguments within those institutions and frameworks, we might obtain outcomes that are not conducive to creating the conditions that allow a flourishing of both culture and nature.
I can see the inherent contradictions in wanting to value the intangibles such as wonder, companionship, and fulfilment that arise from participation in culture or nature, but for now I can see no way out of the conundrum.
Perhaps by travelling a little further down the road of seeking to assess and account for these things, we can develop our understanding and make new connections between groups, communities and concepts that will strengthen society’s appreciation of culture and nature.
Nature provides every single one of our most basic human needs; food, shelter, water and air. It provides incalculable joy and wonder. Culture elevates us as thinking, caring beings of community, providing cohesion and enabling us to communicate and coordinate in mind-bogglingly sophisticated ways. In our quest to ascribe value, we must never lose sight of the intangible.
I’m late to the VUCA party – the acronym was coined in 1987 to reflect Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity1. I’ve since come across it a few times in relation to the nature of society, with particular regard to the rate of change in the digital world and the natural environment.
It’s hard to disagree; the Climate Emergency will cause much larger fluctuations in our ecosystem than we have been used to, requiring us to throw out much of our experience of dealing with relatively benign and predictable climatic conditions, and forcing our communities and organisations to be able to deal rapidly with complex (rather than complicated!) systems2.
This will require new forms of leadership, governance and system management. It will also require us to produce young people (or old!) who have new ways of learning that build on new digital tools for information management; and new ways of acting that build on soft skills of empathy, understanding and story-telling.
I’ve been thinking about this recently with a specific example. I’m a keen user of Logseq, a non-linear note-taking app that is quietly creating ripples in communities of learners and practitioners online. Having experienced the power and elegance of the platform I’ve added it to the list of open source projects to which I contribute financially.
My Logseq information space after 10 months
Some people describe it as a ‘second brain’. One is enough for me, but there have been instances where it’s helped me recall people, organisations or concepts in a way that my real brain would have struggled.
Logseq – or other non-linear note-taking apps – can be used systematically to build insights and understanding. And it could be part of a digital curriculum in Wales. Why not start in primary school?
Some readers might think this is far-fetched, but my experience from letting my own daughter loose on the platform shows that the concept is quickly understood, and in that one case study has led to near-delight in seeing how the information space evolves and grows.
A primary school student’s first attempt playing with Logseq
I know next to nothing about formal education. But with the things I’m doing at home (including encouraging learning the Dvorak touchtyping method3), I’m hoping to help shape people who think beyond ‘normal’; see that systems are often in place due to inertia, and that there are a myriad of ways of approaching problems or situations, some better and some doubtless worse than ‘business as usual’.
How to take these conversations to ‘real’ educators, to see whether there’s any benefit to wider society. Is there a benefit? How can educators participate in this new digital world of learning?
I have very few answers. I will try with my own children, and I am enthusiastic to work with others to consider how these concepts can become part of a more mainstream discourse in education. Could Wales leap-frog other countries in the rate of adoption of these new tools?
Greater VUCA demands more powerful ways to handle data and work with others. We must move more quickly to equip the people of Wales with the tools to match the challenge.
I was sad to read yesterday that Mick Bates, a former member of the Senedd (back when it was an Assembly) had died.
I knew Mick as a tireless and brave campaigner for renewables during a time when many politicians refused to participate in the debate. It seems crazy now, in the world of climate and nature emergencies, but there was a time in Wales – and in mid-Wales in particular – that renewable energy was something of a pariah topic. Mick was someone who was unafraid to put his head above the parapet, and was a key driver of the main advocacy group in the Senedd at the time – NASEG (National Assembly Sustainable Energy Group).
As someone who was relatively early in their career, I really appreciated the NASEG meetings as an opportunity to travel down from Machynlleth to network with colleagues in Cardiff, as well as to stay with my brother and enjoy a night out. Pretty much all the main policy wonks and practitioners from the sector were at those events, and I remember them fondly. It’s how I got to meet people from organisations as diverse as Dulas, Awel Aman Tawe and Arup.
Mick was a brilliant and inspirational Chair. He played an important role in the renewable energy sector in Wales. I will miss him.
Infrastructure is inextricably linked to well-being. Good infrastructure, well-designed and well-located, developed according to sound principles and in collaboration with the end-users, will likely produce outstanding results for a long period of time. The converse is also true.
The new commentary from the Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP) – “Infrastructure and long-term wellbeing” – highlights the complexities of integrating well-being into infrastructure decision-making (TL:DR; what works in one place won’t necessarily work in another, but the right principles applied everywhere will produce results that likely meet expectations).
The report aligns strongly with my personal perspectives on the design of future infrastructure. Yes, infrastructure must align with the needs of current users. But at least as important is the ability of infrastructure to be adapted as those needs develop. Sometimes our requirements will develop in shocking or unexpected ways. We don’t have to reach too far back in our memory to understand viscerally how society can change radically, in just a few short weeks.
Sadly we are unlikely to have to wait too long until future changes also start to impact our society and our infrastructure, and also in radical ways. Wales is going to face increased levels of flooding, coastal erosion, drought and wildfires. Our creativity and imagination will be tested as we seek to procure the infrastructure of the 21st century, still with a limited understanding of the future impacts of an increasingly unstable and ferocious climate.
The long-lived nature of infrastructure investments and developments increases the need for, and value of, getting things right at the outset. Outcomes, both good and bad, can be locked in for many decades.
In this aspect, the WCPP paper is spot-on. I agree that traditional ‘cost-benefit analysis’ has generally favoured approaches that externalise costs, to the detriment of nature, and to the poorest in society who are least able to ‘buy’ their way out of adverse circumstances. However I would go still further. For example, the UK Treasury Green Book approach to public financing of large infrastructure projects does not currently allow for many of the hard-to-calculate (but very large) potential benefits, way in the future, to be calculated.
As an illustration; if a tidal lagoon were developed that could deliver renewable electricity, whilst at the same time offering protection to a vulnerable coastline against erosion and flooding due to rising sea levels, would current valuation methods enable us to calculate the putative benefits for tens of thousands of future householders who then might not suffer the psychological anguish of being flooded? I think not; and yet, those are precisely the sorts of discussions that might offer the best overall value to society.
My personal opinion is that the proposed Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon was a public amenity and a pilot coastal protection project foremost, with the renewable electricity generation as a side benefit. But how to make that argument with current siloed funding streams? From the perspective of a project developer, the path they took was entirely rational – and it nearly succeeded.
With the tools currently at our disposal we are unable to calculate, or even estimate, the myriad different potential outcomes that arise from any given piece of infrastructure. But the WCPP is making a useful contribution to the conversation by emphasising that well-being is no longer a ‘nice to have’, but an integral part of Welsh public policy.
Many parts of the WCPP report align with my personal thinking about how the next National Infrastructure Commission for Wales should operate. Given that construction of grey infrastructure creates a large environmental impact, the most important question should be whether we need it in the first place, followed by other considerations, such as ‘could policy changes achieve a similar result’, or ‘can green or blue infrastructure mitigate the need for grey’? My view on the ‘black route’ of the proposed M4 extension is that these wider considerations were ignored by the previous Welsh Government, and only implicitly embraced when Mark Drakeford became First Minister.
I am hugely encouraged by the Welsh Government’s recent declaration of both a nature and climate emergency, and by the way that Future Generations has started to be integrated into infrastructure planning in Wales. In twenty-plus years of devolution, I have never been more inspired by radical talk emanating from Cathays Park. I should really say ‘radical-sounding’. The only truly radical position these days is business as usual, which will guarantee us a future far less palatable than the past climate we have had the privilege of enjoying, and to a certain extent, squandering.
Where we go next in terms of truly internalising well-being in all its facets is hard to say, but those conversations were once heard only on the fringes of academia and in third-sector meetings. I’m delighted to see that they are becoming mainstream. Our Future Generations have a right to expect no less.
Dr David Clubb is the Chair of the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales. This blog post represents his personal views, and does not represent the views of the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales.
