How long have you been in this role?
Just over six years, since the profession was formed. It now has just over 2,000 members.
How does your day job sit alongside your head of profession role?
I’m the deputy director for environmental science and analysis in Defra. There’s a strong geographic component to my job, and when you look at the Environment Agency, Natural England and some of our other ALBs, Defra has about a third of the overall geography profession membership.
But I’ve learned there’s no bit of government where a consideration of space and place is not important. That’s been the golden thread in my career: from working on school funding to local economic development and regeneration, neighbourhood renewal, the Regional Growth Fund, and the allocation of teacher-training places across the country.
Is it challenging balancing your day job and head of profession job?
Of course. I’m supported by our geography profession manager and a huge number of passionate and supportive volunteers from across the profession. We’re very lucky that there’s a very mature geo landscape, so we do a lot of work with other geo organisations like the Royal Geographical Society, the Association For Geographic Information, GeoPlace and the British Cartographic Society, as well as our departmental sponsor the Geospatial Commission. Our strength is when we work together.
How would you explain what the profession does to people outside government?
We exist to do a number of things. One is to support professional geographers in government, ensuring they have access to training, advice, guidance and networking opportunities. Secondly, to make the case for why taking a geographic approach – considering the impact of place and space – in the design and delivery of government policies matters. Thirdly, to ensure that the geographers in government represent the societies we serve through outreach activity to engage the next generation of geographers.
Do you think people are more aware of the importance of considering place and space now there’s a recognised geography profession?
I think so, but we’re at the beginning of our journey. Most other professions in government have been around for 60 or 70 years, so we’re playing catch up. Our annual awards are a great opportunity to showcase our work – our overall award is presented at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual awards and medal ceremony, which raises the profile and visibility of the work of geographers in the public sector. And we’ve started to see geographers win some of the government analysis function awards.
I also sit on groups with other heads of professions that can influence the work of the other professions. Other professions have their sets of standards and ultimately, I’d love us to have our own, but that will take time to develop. In the meantime, we’ve worked with other professions to make sure that the importance of place is recognised within their guidance. Under the statistics code of practice, for example, there is supplementary guidance on geographic statistics, and the economists’ green book talks about needing to consider the impact on different places as part of distributional impacts.
What are your priorities for the profession at the moment?
My main priority is ensuring that we can continue to deliver the things we already do for our members – our annual conference, monthly webinars, annual awards, outreach material and a really good members’ website, which enables our members to connect with each other across the public sector.
My next priority, following the publication of our 2023-26 strategy, is moving into a new, sustainable leadership structure with a quarterly board and organisational heads of profession who represent our members within their organisations. They will work to grow and develop the profession within their organisations, sitting on their organisational or head-of-profession networks to do the things locally that I’m trying to do across government.
Beyond that, it’s seeing where there are opportunities to make inroads on the three pillars in our strategy: creating the environment for geographers to have maximum impact, professionalising and progressing the use and applications of geography, and growing a diverse and inclusive community of geographers, all within government and the public sector.
How is the implementation of the strategy going?
The big thing so far has been the new leadership structure. The board has met a couple of times now and we are starting to look across all of the organisations to make sure that we’ve got the right representation. We had a number of organisations that naturally fitted into that structure, and we’re now looking to grow and develop across some of the other organisations in the public sector where we don’t have that. That’s going well. It’s really important to me to make sure that we’re hearing the voices of all of our members. When we bring out our first piece of guidance, that will be a big step towards where we want to take the profession in terms of setting standards across the public sector.
Are there any common challenges facing your colleagues in the profession across government?
It was a cross-cutting geographers’ group that first made the case for the profession. We’ve taken the challenges they raised into our work and our strategy. One of the challenges, especially in smaller organisations, is you may have felt quite isolated as a geographer – but now you’re part of a 2,000-strong profession and you can connect with others on our directory. Part of that is understanding your career pathways and what other geographers have done in your organisation to inform you as to how you might develop in your own career journey.
Another challenge was the lack of professional recognition. Sometimes the challenge is that people that you’re working with may not understand the importance of place and space in the design and delivery of public policy. So colleagues may have felt like they were banging their heads against the wall at times, whereas now we can make the case more broadly and give them material that shows where taking this approach has really helped.
What has your experience of working with other government professions been like?
I’m an economic geographer. When I joined the civil service as a fresh-faced graduate in 1999, there was no clear route into government as a geographer. I wanted to enter government as a professional analyst who could use evidence to inform the design and delivery of public policy, so I joined as a member of the Government Economic Service. I benefited hugely in my early career from the support the GES provided and I’m still a badged member.
Now I lead truly multidisciplinary teams. In my team now I have natural scientists working on environmental monitoring schemes and designing robust scientific indicators to measure how the environment is changing; statisticians who publish data on the whole range of the environment; economists doing impact assessments and business cases; social researchers who are evaluating that policy; data scientists and geographers who do spatial modelling and spatial data science. I’m seeing how they have each benefited from the support of their profession.
Do you have any tips for how colleagues in those professions can work most effectively with
people in the geography profession?
There’s the old adage that everything happens somewhere. Drawing on the professional geographers who can collect local data, tell you when it’s robust, understand its appropriate use and visualisation as part of that multidisciplinary offer is really important.
It’s like the question of causation versus correlation. Statisticians will tell you that if you look at ice cream sales and drownings on graphs next to each other, they move exactly the same. So you could conclude that ice cream sales cause drowning – but it’s not that one causes the other. They’re correlated because they’re both caused by sunny days.
The same is true with geography. I’ve seen really bad examples where people put two maps up against two things that are correlated, and they go, ‘These look exactly the same. Therefore, A must be causing B,’ without understanding that there’s an underlying cause, C. Maps are a really useful visual technique, but just like other forms of data visualisation and statistics, if they’re not interpreted properly, you can draw the wrong conclusions. That’s why the profession is really important.
Anything else to add?
We have the best logo out of any of the government professions! We had a competition of our members and this was what came back.