Professor Mike Osborne, Director of PASCAL in Europe was kept busy by Italian colleagues on 25 January in celebration of UNESCO International Day of Education on 24 January with a Lectio Magistralis input at the UNESCO Club of Lucca, as well as being part of the celebrations of the University of Catania’s Department of Education, organised by Professor Roberta Piazza, PASCAL Deputy Director,  at which he gave this recorded message:

Learning, health, inclusion, living productive lives and sustainable development are intimately connected and require localised initiatives and joined-up policy initiatives that recognise the particular characteristics of places.  Healthy children are more likely to perform well at school and adults with high levels of educational attainment are more likely to find high-quality employment. In turn ‘Good Places’ (with positive social, economic, cultural and physical environments) lead to better health. ‘Good places’ contain healthy people, who are more likely to enter learning, gain qualifications and become employed.

Furthermore, they will then become more civically-minded and engaged citizens.  In this context the improvement of life chances in cities is vital, and reflective of the need to maximise the positive elements of urban spaces as well as combat the challenges of rapid and accelerating urbanisation: poverty, crime, environmental risks, poor health and inequitable access to learning. 

An important vehicle for urban development is ‘learning city/region’, places within which stakeholders across sectors of education, businesses, the public sector, cultural organisations and NGOs co-operate to create cohesive and inclusive learning frameworks for all citizens to enable educational progression. However, we must remember that inside the learning city/region there is heterogeneity, and our educational interventions need to be nuanced at fine levels of geography, and ensure that they are reflective of the needs and demands of citizens. This suggests the importance of neighbourhood and the bottom-up co-construction of research-informed initiatives working with those who live there, and for their benefit.  This is a likely route to sustainable actions. I therefore recommend that all students of education and especially those who are training to be teachers to consider these wider aspects of learning.

A similar message is found at the University of Glasgow’s School of Education website together with inputs from other members of the Centre for Sustainable Healthy Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods.