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HEF Highlights October – December 2023

Quarter 3 2023/24 was a busy governance period for the Historic Environment Forum. Our Chair, Dr Adrian Olivier, was re-appointed for a second term of leadership, and we made improvements and updates to our Terms of Reference to reflect how the Forum’s work has grown. 

Our Task Groups continued to work collaboratively with partners, with our Resilience Task Group taking steps to review and evaluate activity underway via the Heritage Sector Resilience Plan (HSRP). Our second Task Group scoped and kick-started a new focus on Green Skills in Heritage, with more updates to follow. 

The main assembly of HEF gathered twice during Quarter 3,  with both meetings in this case providing opportunities for dialogue with DCMS on key policy issues for the sector, and to work closely with Historic England colleagues on Heritage Counts. Alongside this, the Heritage Skills Demand Group and the Historic Environment Protection Reform Group, both continued to convene and make progress against their respective workplans.

We launched our new Heritage Sector Resilience Interview series to spotlight and showcase collaborative action already underway across the historic environment sector that supports or relates to the HSRP.  Ten interviews covering the theme of ‘Skills’ are now available to read as a collection, and we look forward to highlighting further initiatives on the theme of ‘Climate Change’ as we progress through the early months of 2024.

The HEF Team. 

Skills Resilience: an Interview with Cara Jones, Sector Skills Manager at the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists

As part of the Skills theme of our Sector Resilience Interview series, we heard Cara Jones, Sector Skills Manager at the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA). Cara shares how taking a joined-up approach and sharing good practice across UK nations is a key part of CIfA’s skills strategy for archaeology.
Read on to find out more.
Cara, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in the heritage sector.

I am the Sector Skills Manager at the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA) which is the leading professional body representing archaeologists working in the UK and overseas. We promote high professional standards and strong ethics in archaeological practice, to maximise the benefits that archaeologists bring to society. We are the authoritative and effective voice for archaeologists, bringing recognition and respect to our profession.

We believe that to maximise the value of archaeology, it needs to be carried out with professionalism, which in turn can help attract diverse talent and support career development. Our strategic skills work helps support the active delivery of these beliefs.

What can you tell us about CIfA’s strategic skills work? What does it aim to achieve?

The Sector Skills Manager post is a relatively new role but brings together our strategic skills work from across the UK – from leading on Aim 5 (Skills and Innovation) of Scotland’s Archaeology Strategy, to being a member of the steering group for the Historic Environment Skills Forum.

It is allowing CIfA to take a more strategic approach to skill development work and share great practice across the UK. This includes the development of apprenticeships and new qualifications – both designed to support new entry routes into the profession and help address skill gaps.

What contribution will this work make towards the resilience of the heritage sector?

Skill development is a devolved matter; however, archaeologists work across borders, so our skill development work should too. CIfA’s UK wide remit allows different work strands from across the Home Nations to inform and inspire actions and initiatives in all corners of the UK. For example, data collection (on skills needs) in Scotland (as part of Scotland’s Archaeology Strategy) is helping inform data collection practice in Northern Ireland (associated with the Archaeology 2030 archaeology strategy). Lessons learned during the (apprenticeship) Trailblazer process in England is helping inform apprenticeship development in Scotland. The experience we have developed supporting the delivery of the Skills Investment Plan in Scotland, is now being applied to the Historic Environment Skills Forum. I could go on!

Ultimately, this joined up approach will help save time, resource, capitalise on shared expertise and enable standardised development processes to take place in all areas of the UK.

What does success look like?  Do you have plans to measure this?

On a personal level, I hope that in 10 to 15 years’ time, there will be multiple entry routes into careers in archaeology, enabling access for anyone who wants to join the profession.

The lack of diversity within the profession is still an acute issue – developing different entry routes can support more diverse candidates into archaeology. There is obviously a lot of work to do to keep them in archaeology – professional development initiatives have a large role to play there too. All of this takes time though, there is no overnight quick fix and any evaluative measures needs to take that into account. As the professional institute for archaeologists, CIfA is able to take that long-term view and monitor (hopefully positive!) change.

How can colleagues find out more, or get involved?

One easy step is to join the Historic Environment Skills Forum Knowledge Hub – we have just started with a series of webinars focused on skills. We would love to see you all there!

Overall, what do you think is most crucial for ensuring a resilient heritage sector?

Sub-sector collaboration! I passionately believe that skill development initiatives can be one element of solving some of the big issues in archaeology, however that requires partnership working and collaboration from all of us!

This Sector Resilience interview was shared by Cara Jones as part of our Heritage Sector Resilience Plan activities. 

If you’d like to contribute an interview as part of the series, follow the link below to find out more:

Sector Resilience Interviews – Historic Environment Forum

Skills Resilience: an Interview with Jonathan Thompson, Senior Heritage Advisor at the CLA

As part of the Skills theme of our Sector Resilience Interview series, we heard from Jonathan Thompson, Senior Heritage Advisor at the Country Land & Business Association. Jonathan tells us all about the support CLA offers its members on using skilled professionals, and why encouraging the market demand for heritage skills is an important part of the resilience picture.
Read on to find out more.
Jonathan, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in the heritage sector.

The CLA (Country Land & Business Association) has 27,000 members who manage rural businesses and land, including at least a quarter of all heritage – making us much the largest stakeholder group of managers and owners of heritage.  This includes many major listed buildings and monuments, but most is the unglamorous, sometimes undesignated, but vital heritage of cottages, farm and industrial buildings, stone walls, and bumps in fields. 

My job as CLA senior heritage adviser is also unglamorous, but is at the heart of resilience: helping all those owners to ensure that heritage is usable, valued, and financially viable, because – given its high maintenance costs – heritage that isn’t viable is inevitably at potential risk.  This isn’t easy.  And although 98% of owners think heritage is important, approaching half think the actual heritage protection system is ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ (Historic England; and CLA/Historic Houses surveys; 2022), so we all need to do more work on this.

What heritage advice and support does the CLA offer its members? How does this help skills resilience in the heritage sector?

The CLA provides its large audience with 1:1 advice, webinars, and extensive guidance notes written from an owner viewpoint.  All this helps members manage and change heritage in informed, sympathetic, and financially-realistic ways. 

It especially stresses using heritage skills, because that pays, both in better heritage and financial outcomes on the ground, and (often if not always) in quicker/better consent decisions.  This also builds market demand for heritage skills.

Why does resilience require market demand for heritage skills?

The Historic Environment Forum (HEF) conference on heritage skills some years ago concluded that years of sector work to build skills supply had had only limited success, and that it was vital to work just as hard on skills demand because, without sustained demand, we won’t create sustained supply.  HEF set up what is now the HEF Heritage Skills Demand Group (HSDG), co-chaired by Patrick Whife of ICON and myself.  The establishment of the HSDG was identified as a priority action for the sector’s overall skills resilience under the Heritage Sector Resilience Plan, and the group has endorsement from the Historic Environment Forum to develop a plan of action that will raise awareness and encourage the demand for skills.

Lack of demand – because owners use non-heritage-skilled people, or simply lack the confidence to do anything at all – is not easy to fix, but particular HSDG focuses include improving planning policy so that heritage applications will include genuine analysis of heritage significance and impact, and making it easier to find and employ heritage-skilled people.

What does success look like?  Do you have plans to measure this?

If we can get this right, and especially if people begin to use heritage skills much more, that will show up in more and better applications and better outcomes;  and the Historic England, CLA, and Historic Houses research which shows where things are now not working can be re-run to show whether they have improved.

How can colleagues find out more, or get involved?

More detail about HSDG and how to join the group can be found here.

You can join the CLA at www.cla.org.uk.

 

Overall, what do you think is most crucial for ensuring a resilient heritage sector?

Regulation often has the (entirely unintended) outcome of putting hurdles in the way of the good guys while leaving the bad guys unaffected.  For heritage, we need to find careful ways to reverse that, better controlling the small minority of bad guys, but above all proactively helping benign owners to give heritage a viable future.

This Sector Resilience interview was shared by Jonathan Thompson as part of our Heritage Sector Resilience Plan activities. 

If you’d like to contribute an interview as part of the series, follow the link below to find out more:

Sector Resilience Interviews – Historic Environment Forum

Skills Resilience: an Interview with Nicola Duncan-Finn, Head of Heritage Skills at English Heritage

As part of the Skills theme of our Sector Resilience Interview series, we heard from Nicola Duncan-Finn, Head of Heritage Skills at English Heritage, all about the development of the organisation’s skills programme.  
Read on to find out more.
Nicola, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in the heritage sector.

I was appointed as English Heritage’s first Head of Heritage Skills in Summer 2023. I am delighted to be leading on the development of our new programme of work to support the sustainability and growth of specialist heritage craft and building skills, aligned to our ongoing programme of conservation at the historic sites we care for across England, and to help support the skills needed for the future across the heritage sector. 

Why is this work important to English Heritage and the wider sector?

English Heritage cares for over 400 historic monuments and properties across England, on behalf of the nation.  These sites span 6 millennia and range from world famous prehistoric sites, to grand medieval castles, and from Roman forts through to a Cold War bunker.  This remarkable and varied National Heritage Collection embodies an exemplary pedigree of heritage craftsmanship in its surviving fabric, which is woven into  sites over centuries by committed craftspeople, including bricklayers, carpenters, flint workers and glaziers to name but a few.  But the collective energy, creative talents and technical skills that have filtered down through the ‘heads, hearts and hands’ of successive generations is dwindling.  Indeed, we have reached the point where a worrying pattern of skills loss and multi-generational skills gaps are being reported across various traditional crafts nationally, and the sector is  understandably concerned about the increasing vulnerability of our national ecosystem for heritage skills. The rich golden thread of heritage skills that has traditionally connected the National Heritage Collection to our wider historic built environment and which has supported the preservation of heritage sites across the country is beginning to incrementally fray.  

Without action, it has been predicted that the sector’s current heritage craft skills workforce will be unable to meet the future projected need for ongoing maintenance, conservation, climate adaptation and carbon reduction initiatives over the next decade.  From our own experience of caring for the National Heritage Collection, where we spend in excess of £25m annually on conservation maintenance and projects, we are finding it increasingly challenging to procure some traditional crafts.  Notably traditional flint-working (working with flint stones) and mill-writing (repairing windmills) are now both classified as Critically Endangered Craft Skills on the Heritage Crafts Association’s Red List of Endangered Crafts.

Looking forward, we must acknowledge that the long-term survival and resilience of the UK’s intergenerational craft skills, and their ability to continue to transcend the past and connect the present to the future, will be dependent on the collective actions we take across the sector over the next 10 years. 

Valuable knowledge sharing and collaborative working across the sector has already begun to ramp thanks to the formation of such fora as the Historic Environment Skills Forum (an action prioritised by the Historic Environment Forum’s Heritage Sector Resilience Plan). English Heritage wants to play our part in supporting this work to ensure that heritage skills continue to not only ‘survive’ but to ‘thrive’ for future generations.

An infographic , showing the variety of types of heritage properties that form part of the National Heritage collection

The National Heritage Collection comprises a huge variety of heritage properties requiring care and appropriate skills. Image (c) English Heritage

How are you developing your new Heritage Skills Programme?

Following engagement with sector colleagues, we’re developing a model with three key components that we feel will be crucial to sustaining the specialist heritage skills needed to continue conserving the National Heritage Collection and the wider heritage sector in the future:

  • Inspire – it’s never too early to spark the imaginations of the next generation of guardians for our historic environment. Building on our existing youth engagement work and learning opportunities, we want to inspire and engage school children, to encourage them to consider the idea of a future working in the heritage sector.  Our Conservation in Action programme has also provided us with exciting opportunities to give families and communities the chance to try their hand at specialist heritage skills and to understand what it takes to care for the historic sites in our care.

  • Promote – we want to work in partnership with training providers and local community heritage groups, to engage and inspire further education students training for careers in the construction trade – so that they have the opportunity to explore traditional heritage skills at the historic sites that we care for and to consider this as a potential career path. To help coordinate how our sector seeks to engage young people, we also want to support the development of Regional Heritage Skills Networks, working alongside local partners to help map skills needs in each area and drawing upon insights from our experience of caring for the National Heritage Collection across different parts of the country and the experiences of other partners.

  • Grow – subject to securing the necessary funding, we want to launch a pilot programme in East Anglia – to create new training pathways to help preserve the endangered skill of flint working – which is crucial to the preservation of the many historic sites across the region and the wider south east that are built from flint. This would include giving trainees and apprentices the opportunity to develop these specialist skills caring for the remarkable properties that form part of the National Heritage Collection.  We also have strong ambitions to develop a wider national English Heritage network of Heritage Craft Skill Apprenticeship Training Roles and specialist training hubs at some of our sites. Opportunities to incorporate an externally facing flexible apprenticeship training strand,  delivered in partnership with organisations that share our commitment to providing transformational career opportunities and industry-leading training, is also under review.
How can colleagues support the efforts or get involved?

If after reading this article and you or the organisation you are working with would be interested in finding our more about English Heritage’s new Heritage Skills Programme and exploring possible opportunities to work collaboratively with us on this important initiative, please do get in touch at heritageskills@english-heritage.org.uk.

Overall, what do you think is most crucial for ensuring a resilient heritage sector?

Given the scale of the challenge we are facing, it is only by working together collaboratively that will we be able to ensure the sustainability of traditional heritage skills and to keep them alive for future generations.

This Sector Resilience interview was shared by Nicola Duncan-Finn as part of our Heritage Sector Resilience Plan activities. 

If you’d like to contribute an interview as part of the series, follow the link below to find out more:

Sector Resilience Interviews – Historic Environment Forum

Skills Resilience: an Interview with Callum Bainbridge, Stonemason Apprentice at Hardwick Hall

As part of the Skills theme of our Sector Resilience Interview series, we heard from Callum Bainbridge, an Apprentice Stonemason for the National Trust, all about his training experience at Hardwick Hall.
Read on to find out more.
Callum, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in the heritage sector.

My name is Callum Bainbridge and I am an apprentice stonemason at the National Trust based at Hardwick Hall. I started my apprenticeship in September 2022 and since then I have been lucky enough to work at and visit a number of National Trust properties including Calke Abbey, Fountains Abbey, Clumber park, Tattershall Castle and Kedleston Hall.

What can you share with us about your apprenticeship experience at Hardwick?  What skills have you learnt so far?

As an apprentice stonemason at Hardwick, I have been given a great opportunity to learn a range of different skills relating to conservation and heritage. For example, stonemasons at the National Trust do the traditional method of using a mallet and chisel to mason and carve the stone. I have learnt how to take measurements from a stone in a building before doing a drawing and creating templates. I have also learnt how to point using lime mortars, as well as learning about the properties of lime and how to behaves in different environments and conditions.

Do you feel apprenticeships like yours are helping to create a stronger, more resilient workforce in the heritage sector?

I would say so because they give young people an opportunity to learn skills that will always be needed as these buildings require constant repair and maintenance work.

The apprenticeship route makes learning these skills more accessible to people because they get to earn a wage while learning and they will have people who are willing to mentor them.

What advice would you give someone who might be considering an apprenticeship route into the heritage sector? ?

I would say go for it because in my opinion it is the best way to learn if you want to work in the heritage sector. You should be given plenty of support and the opportunity to learn new skills as well as being paid to do so.

Overall, what do you think is most crucial for ensuring a resilient heritage sector?

Knowledgeable and skilful people. The more people we have with the skills and knowledge to do the work that is needed to protect our heritage, the more resilient the heritage sector will be. I think that apprenticeships are the best way to get more people into this type of work and learning these skills. We should also be looking to continually invest in the people already in the space as well, giving them opportunities to expand their skillset even further.

This Sector Resilience interview was shared by Callum Bainbridge as part of our Heritage Sector Resilience Plan activities. Richard Wilkes, Building Supervisor at Hardwick Hall, also shared his perspectives – read Richard’s interview.

If you’d like to contribute an interview as part of the series, follow the link below to find out more:

Sector Resilience Interviews – Historic Environment Forum

HEF News Archive
HEF News Archive

Bringing together senior members of staff from public and non-government bodies to work collaboratively on strategic matters for the historic environment sector.

 

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