It’s Sunday night, three weeks into our second placement. I should be watching Top Gear (one of my many failings as a future leader in sustainability is a guilty love of this horribly unsustainable programme). Instead I’m reflecting on a discussion on Friday with the Director of Services for children, young people and families in Cornwall County Council. It was a bit of an inspiration really.

On the surface it was a discussion about the reform of children’s services in the Council, not about sustainability. But I’m busy drafting the placement report that we all need to submit to Forum for the Future in a week or so, and so I’m trying to collect my thoughts about how the local authority can make a step-change in its contribution to sustainable development. I keep coming back to the need for a change in the organisational culture, and the changes pushed through the children’s services department in recent years seem to provide a model for the rest of the Council to follow.

It feels crazy, and not a little daunting, that after three weeks of a four-week placement I already have to form judgements about how to drive sustainable development in a local authority. At times I feel totally naïve, especially when staff that have been working in this field for years look to me for fresh inspiration, or a sounding board for their ideas. If I’m honest there have been a couple of times in the past few weeks where I’ve felt totally out of my depth!

But it’s a testament to this Masters that, three months in, I already feel much more confident both to offer up my thoughts on how to implement sustainable development and to manage situations where I don’t yet feel adequately equipped to respond.

This confidence is partly because our studies have already given us myriad opportunities to learn from experts in their field, some right at the forefront of sustainability, others old hands at things like making the rusty cogs of local government run like clockwork.

Sara Parkin is one of Forum’s two founder directors and principal tutor for the sustainable development element of the theoretical tuition that is squeezed almost impossibly tightly in between our six work placements. Sara introduced the year by explaining that, in 10 months, we will be exposed to experiences and have access to expertise that would normally be spread over a whole career.

This might sound somewhat intense…it is! We’ve got a week of our local authority placements left, and then a week more back at Forum’s offices, and I’m definitely craving the Christmas break, if only to catch up on some much needed sleep (and of course the sadly neglected reading list…)

But it also means that the year so far has been packed full of invaluable experiences - top of my mind at the moment is our residential ‘sustainability literate leadership’ course at the Leadership Trust in Herefordshire.
Just before we dispersed around the country for our second placements my fellow students and I spent three exhausting days in a manor house on the Welsh border getting a taste of the sort of leadership qualities needed to deliver sustainability. The mental intensity of the course almost made my brain go into early retirement, but I learnt a huge amount about myself and about the 11 other people with whom I am doing this course.

And it’s those 11 that make this course unique. Unlike most academic study, we operate very much as a team of 12 throughout the year; learning to work well together is crucial if we are to get the maximum benefit from the Masters. As a group we are still getting to know each other, yet we already share inspirations and frustrations and I hope that by the end of the year we will have built up professional relationships (and just as importantly friendships) that will last throughout our careers.

With the triple crunch of our economic woes, rising concerns about peak oil, and the ‘final countdown’ of the hundred months climate change campaign, there has never been so great a need for a radical, exciting and sustainable alternative to our current way of life. The nature of that alternative isn’t yet clear but it feels good to be searching for it on this course, whether in discussions with senior figures such as a Director of a local authority, or in reflecting on the pressures and priorities that each of my placement organisation faces in trying to achieve sustainability. Begrudgingly I’ll even admit that it’s more rewarding than watching Top Gear!