Sustainability Accounting.

Current models of creative education demonstrate a system in which students are perpetually engaged, trained and prepared for professional engagement. But, a question arises as to what happens to these students once they have graduated, or should they change creative direction in later life?

Artists, designers, and creatives of whatever description, often require states of ‘opportunity’ in which to conceptually and commercially operate, where this implicates notions of support, occasion, moment, fortuity, space, liberty, and excuse.

Furthermore, in an age of the evolving ‘gig’ economy, it is expected that many graduates, from different walks of the arts, humanities and sciences, may never know full-time or linear employment, in the way their parents might have.

So, if we accept that creative education is integral to wider education, surely a developed language of ‘opportunity,’ as a dedicated subject of learning and instruction, must be developed within art and design institutions.

If we are increasingly questioning how much fast fashion is produced, the working conditions of factory workers, and issues of landfill waste, etc., then why are we not similarly questioning what happens to graduates once they have been ‘produced?’ And, if we are now expecting fashion brands to take back old or unwanted clothing, do institutions have a corresponding responsibility to ‘take back’ graduates or alumni, to creatively re-train or transform them for new or revised activity?

This is not to say that individuals simply re-enroll for a new course with new tuition fees, but rather where there is formal obligation by the original host institution to provide access to forms of ‘upthinking,’ and programmes of educational enhancement for life.