First Fellow-led RSA manifesto launched

The RSA has published ‘Day One’, its first Fellow-led manifesto, which includes proposals covering society, the environment, education and youth.

With people voting in more than 60 countries across the world in 2024, the Day One Manifesto discusses how governments can develop new societal contracts to prioritise regeneration, education and sustainability.

According to RSA Chief Executive Andy Haldane: “This is the perfect moment to inject into the global debate the ideas of our Fellows as part of a Day One Manifesto. I hope these ideas provide food not just for thought among our Fellows and beyond, but for action.”

More than 300 submissions were received from Fellows following a request on Circle. These were then narrowed down to 12 by an expert panel including Haldane, Chair of Fellowship Council Neil Beagrie and RSA Director of Fellowship Line Kristensen.

Ideas include: redefining ‘education’ to emphasise collaboration and behavioural skills; building ‘community wealth’; giving a greater focus to long-termism in government policies; passing a Sustainable Manufacturing Act; providing ‘spatial justice’ for children and young people; and making better use of council-owned ‘dead spaces’.

The submission on redefining education was developed by Saskia Listle, the founder of the Academy of Future Skills. She pointed out that education is too often defined according to technical skills – many of which can now be performed using new technologies – and that competition outweighs collaboration.

Her submission states: “My appeal for a Day One vision would be to include the call for redefining education from a technical, skills-based model to a more collaborative and behavioural skills-based approach. Not only would that take pressure away from the competition between machines and humans, it would acknowledge that there are different skill sets that are inherent to one or the other and thus could be performed more efficiently by one or the other.”

Phillip Ward, Sustainability Network Lead, provided the submission on long-termism in government, and also in private sector investment and public procurement. He calls for a UK-wide version of The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, which protects the rights of future generations in everything the Welsh government and its public services deliver.

“Surely, it is time to press for this approach to be adopted across the UK,” he writes. “A duty on government to government to promote the wellbeing of future generations, however, should [also] affect the way businesses and markets are regulated and how they report to shareholders and the public.”