New Future was founded with a core ambition in mind – to help grow a construction and design workforce equipped to build within the context of a climate crisis. It does this through compound goals.

Firstly, through developing training models to build sustainable construction skills for people who work, or want to work, in the built environment. Secondly, through the deliberate integration of design and trade professions into that training gamut – crafting a curriculum that teaches designers to be builders and builders to be designers. And thirdly, to build economic autonomy around this upskilling, supplanting the shortfalls of traditional funding with commercial activities that also help promote building better. We want sustainable construction education to be free at its point of access, with apprenticeships and learning schemes paying people a real living wage.

Our wider goal is to improve the culture of the industry overall. We think this starts with early education, with embedding values and beliefs around trades, design, and environmental responsibility from primary school level. From there, we believe it naturally grows into fostering a better built environment, combating the decline in construction quality in the UK that traces back to a lack of training, culminating in fragmented industries.

How will we do this? Our central output will be to launch a comprehensive training programme called the New Future Construction School – a model that will equip construction sector participants with skills needed to preserve the existing, and decarbonise the future, built environment. This serves New Future’s goal to trigger a shift within the current model of vocational skills training.

Who will it impact? New Future will be a supportive space for new and existing construction students and professionals. It will help this community become more symbiotic, training individuals to become versatile, multi-skilled experts in the practical application of bio-based and circular materials. Hands- on retrofit and heritage training will be delivered through live projects, including rehabilitating disused and at-risk buildings for community benefit.

Where will we work? We are a Glasgow-based team, but our aspiration is to have national impact and, hopefully in time, become a legitimate voice within the global effort to decarbonise construction activity. To begin with, New Future will work to bridge the widening sustainable construction skills gap in Scotland, advocating for a low-carbon, circular material culture in construction work.

New Future is a small, collaborative group led by Verity Hocking and Rob Colvin. It is supported by trustees and advisors from architecture, education, energy, and sustainability sectors.

New Future is a cooperative community benefit society and considers its role to be rooted in advocacy and implementation. It is not a pressure or activist organisation in the traditional sense – its focus is to create models and pathways that demonstrate how change is possible.

New Future is driven by an urgent sense that current construction systems are inadequate – by a pragmatic belief that better training, education and joined-up practice can reshape the industry.

New Future was launched, and is run by, architectural practitioners – individuals who have experience and understanding of the complexities of construction. The idea emerged as a reaction to an existing industry disconnect between technical demands of building science and broader responsibilities of sustainable and healthy design.

With its foundations also anchored in education, New Future’s founders began joining the dots in 2022, seeing the need for an organisation that merged technical and design practice through holistic learning. These early conversations led to the formal incorporation of New Future in 2023, based in Scotland, with Glasgow as its initial operational base.