Thursday, 5 November 2026

Opinion: Public Service Planners, Professional Training and the Technical Grade

Why shortlisting for planners should start with a postgraduate qualification

This is an editorial from BPS Planning, issued for discussion only.

Open any recent candidate booklet for Assistant Planner and the education requirement is the same. Tipperary, Longford, Kildare and others ask for an honours degree at Level 8 on the National Framework of Qualifications in Planning, a stated period of satisfactory planning experience, and a high standard of technical training. A master’s is not required. Irish Planning Institute or Royal Town Planning Institute membership is often desirable, not essential. That wording is not a drafting quirk. It is how local authorities, under Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage circulars, now define the entry grade of a profession that once trained almost entirely at postgraduate level.

The grade those booklets fill is a technical and professional one. In local government structures, Assistant, Executive, Senior Executive and Senior Planner sit with the corresponding engineer and architect grades, not with the clerical and administrative ladder from Clerical Officer to Senior Executive Officer. From 1 June 2026, under Circular EL 04/2026 and the Public Service Agreement 2024–2026, Assistant Planner pay runs from €48,248 to €74,809 including the second long-service increment; Executive Planner from €60,858 to €84,596. Those are the same euro figures as Assistant and Executive Engineer. The technical grade is real. The question is what professional training is needed to justify it.

Ireland’s modern planning education did not begin with a four-year undergraduate degree. University College Dublin’s Regional and Urban Planning programme commenced in October 1966. The Irish Planning Institute’s own history records that the first formally educated planners trained in the Republic graduated from the College of Technology, Bolton Street, and from UCD in 1969; before that, aspirants sat Royal Town Planning Institute external examinations or studied abroad. The Institute itself was launched in November 1975. University College Cork’s Masters in Planning and Sustainable Development took its foundation class in October 2006. The undergraduate route came later. Technological University Dublin’s combined BSc in Spatial Planning and Environmental Management, under the old DIT code DT106, produced its first graduating cohort in 2005, which implies a first intake around 2001, and that programme, now TU835, is fully accredited by the Irish Planning Institute as a standalone four-year degree. UCD’s BSc in City Planning and Environmental Policy, by contrast, is IPI-accredited only when completed with the accelerated Master of Regional and Urban Planning. So the Republic’s professional tradition was postgraduate first; the accredited undergraduate pathway is real, recent, and, in TU Dublin’s case, fully recognised. I taught in the School of Spatial Planning at DIT between 2002 and 2005, in the early years of that undergraduate experiment, and I have no interest in talking down the graduates it has produced.

Many fine planners in the public service and in private practice hold a primary planning degree and no more. Experience on planning applications, at oral hearings and in forward planning teams matters, and shortlisting that ignored experience would make little sense. Nor is a Level 8 award a trivial thing. What it is not, on its own, is a complete answer to why planners are paid and graded as technical professionals rather than as administrative officers who happen to work in a planning section. Plenty of staff on administrative grades also hold primary degrees. The technical grade has to be justified by something more than that: by a depth of professional education in planning as a discipline, or by a recognised planning specialism built on top of a first degree, together with the experience the booklets already require.

Here I must be careful. It is my observation, from competitions and from conversation across the profession, that candidates with an accredited postgraduate qualification in planning sometimes lose out at interview to candidates who hold only a primary degree. I am not claiming a published pattern, and I have seen no Irish Planning Institute or union statistics that would prove one. Eligibility under the current booklets treats both as Level 8 in Planning. Interview boards then score competencies: planning policy and practice, delivering results, performance through people, personal effectiveness. On that footing, a master’s confers no automatic advantage. Whether boards undervalue postgraduate professional education is an open question. The same arrangement can also mean that candidates with a master’s or a doctorate in planning are interviewed by a board whose planning member holds a primary degree. That is no reflection on the experience and judgement of the people who sit on those boards, many of whom are excellent and senior planners. It does suggest, though, that the system has not yet decided how much weight advanced professional education should carry. That such outcomes can happen is enough to ask whether the shortlisting stage is doing the work it should.

Public appointments practice already distinguishes eligibility from shortlisting. Guidance associated with the Commission for Public Service Appointments Code of Practice, which applies to technical and professional appointments in local authorities, expects clear differentiation between essential and desirable requirements, objective criteria linked to the role, and shortlisting on essential requirements and, where appropriate, the most desirable ones. Restrictive eligibility criteria, by contrast, can be treated as a breach. The practical implication is important. Raising the eligibility bar overnight so that only master’s holders may apply would need careful justification and would cut across the State’s present drive to widen the recruitment pool. Using postgraduate planning, or a recognised planning specialism, as a leading desirable criterion at shortlisting is a different and more defensible approach: it keeps the Level 8 door open, ranks professional education honestly, and invites degree-only candidates to interview when no better-qualified candidate is available.

The shortage argument has to be faced squarely. The Department’s Ministerial Action Plan on Planning Resources, published in October 2024, sets out fourteen actions on education, recruitment, retention and efficiency. It expressly seeks to increase uptake of undergraduate and postgraduate places, to run graduate recruitment campaigns, and in particular to review qualification requirements for planning posts in local government so that the sector can attract as wide a pool of talent as possible. In March 2025, Town Planning Officer was added to the Critical Skills Occupations List after a joint submission that included the Irish Planning Institute. The Office of the Planning Regulator’s advice to would-be planners is that an IPI- or RTPI-accredited qualification is normally required. The direction of policy, in other words, is towards more planners, more routes in, and a wider pool. A profession that responds to shortage by narrowing the gate without expanding the numbers coming through the colleges would be doing itself no favours.

The answer to the shortage is not to pretend that a primary degree and a postgraduate qualification are the same thing. It is to fund more accredited postgraduate places; to support part-time and conversion master’s routes for serving staff who entered on a primary degree and wish to deepen their professional education; and, if shortlisting practice changes, to allow a clear transition period so that people already in the system are not left at a disadvantage. Widening the pool and honouring professional depth are not opposites if the State pays for the depth.

All of this is unfolding inside a much larger industrial dispute in which planners are present but not to the forefront. Since late September 2026, Fórsa members in local government have been on work-to-rule, with SIPTU members across local authorities and state agencies on similar action, over the failure to agree a successor public service pay deal. There was a full-day strike on 14 October. A further national stoppage is planned for 12 November. As of 4 November, Workplace Relations Commission efforts to restore face-to-face talks had produced no breakthrough; Fórsa’s general secretary warned that one-day national strikes could give way to rolling sectoral disruption. The dispute is about pay, living standards and inflation risk across hundreds of thousands of public servants. It is not a planner’s dispute, and the Irish Planning Institute has not been its public face.

Planning has, however, felt the knock-on effects. The Irish Examiner reported on 26 October that further commencement of the Planning and Development Act 2024 has been paused because of the work-to-rule, with the Department of Housing citing circumstances beyond its control and a substantial portion of the Act still to be brought into force. Fórsa’s own local government guidance draws a useful line: routine individual planning applications and normal statutory services may continue, and engagement with applicants’ agents on those applications should continue; participation in broader restructuring, modernisation and change programmes is covered by the instruction to withdraw cooperation. So day-to-day applications may still be processed while the reform programme stalls. That is an awkward place for a profession that the State needs both to process applications and to implement the new planning legislation.

What, then, should be done about professional training and the technical grade? Several options are open. One is to leave eligibility and shortlisting as they are and trust interview boards to weigh professional education case by case. That is straightforward, and it matches the Action Plan’s wish to widen the pool, but it leaves the technical grade resting on a Level 8 award that administrative grades also commonly hold. A second is to raise eligibility itself to an accredited postgraduate qualification. That would be the cleanest professional statement, and the hardest to reconcile quickly with shortage and with fair treatment of serving staff. A third, the one I favour, is to keep Level 8 eligibility, state clearly that an accredited postgraduate qualification in planning or a recognised planning specialism is a leading desirable criterion, and shortlist those candidates first, inviting degree-only applicants to interview only where no better-qualified candidate is available. Experience would still count. TU Dublin’s fully accredited BSc would still open the door. Serving staff could be offered funded conversion routes. And the academic analogy, offered gently, still holds: few university departments would shortlist an applicant with a master’s for a post alongside doctoral candidates as if the two awards said the same thing about professional education. Planners may not want to hear that. The technical grade requires us to say it anyway.

You cannot bring a more demanding planning system into force with a diminished sense of what a planner is. The pay dispute will be settled, or not, on terms that apply far beyond planning departments. The question of professional education is ours. If we want the technical grade, we have to justify it in the booklet, at shortlisting, and in the training places the State says it is willing to fund.

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