A review of Instruments of Architectural Accreditation & Registration/Licensure
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
For the past year I’ve been reading international architectural accreditation systems. All of them.
The debate about architectural accreditation reform, here in Australia and everywhere else, tends to run on anecdote. Someone’s last panel visit. Something a colleague heard. What the criteria “feel like.” So, for the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (AASA), I built the thing the conversation was missing in the form of a documentary comparison of the accreditation and registration instruments of the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU, read against our own National Standard of Competency for Architects (NSCA), with every criterion from every instrument reproduced in full and every claim traceable to a primary source.
Three things the evidence shows.
Counting performance criteria tells you almost nothing. The instruments range from eleven broad points (EU) to sixty specific criteria (Australia). But count records how finely an expectation is divided, not how much is asked of a student or graduate. A short instrument can pack heavy demand into each piece, and a long one can spread light demand across many.
The international systems agree at graduation and split afterwards. Every instrument asks essentially the same of a graduating student. It’s after graduation that they diverge in kind, not degree. Only the UK and Australia write performance criteria for the registration threshold at all; North America runs on recorded hours and examination.
Australia’s 2021 NSCA “simplification” wasn’t one. Seventy criteria became sixty, but the content of exactly one criterion was dropped. The rest was consolidated into fewer, denser criteria, and per-criterion demand rose on every measure I analysed them against, including the number of operations asked of a candidate; the scope and qualifying conditions attached to each criterion; sheer word count; and structural complexity on the SOLO taxonomy. A shorter standard was not a lighter one. That cuts both ways. Criteria count can’t convict an instrument of being overly demanding, but it can’t acquit it either.
The report makes no recommendation. It ends with questions, not answers. But I think the questions perhaps are better ones than we’ve been asking.
My thanks to the colleagues inside the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom systems who checked the international sections against how those systems actually run.
Dr Chris Brisbin SFHEA AIA
President | Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (AASA)
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