The CBA’s ‘Vision’ is to enable anyone to have the skills and opportunity to tell the stories of the people and places that connect us to our world, that help us understand it and to make it a better, more inclusive place.

Our Mission is to inspire people to explore places and engage with their environment through archaeology, we will help them make new connections with each other and the places in which they live, work, learn and grow. We will also help people explore and create heritage that matters to them, championing fresh perspectives in how we recognize and value things and places, everywhere. Finally, we aim to grow the public value of archaeology by connecting commercial, academic, and community groups to demonstrate the social impact of archaeology.

The CBA strongly believe that wider participation is essential to archaeology and it underpins our core values and approach to our work.

Anyone should be able to participate in archaeological activities and archaeology should be open to everyone. Yet, as an organisation, we recognise that we still have work to do to better understand many of the issues facing individuals participating in archaeology and to create changes that ensure archaeology is accessible to everyone. To this end, we have identified three key issues that we believe are crucial to ensuring that archaeology is a fair and open discipline and that we will therefore seek to address in our future work. These are the issues of othering, legacy, and representation.

One of the ways in which we are tackling the issue of participation is through our Youth Engagement programmes. The Young Archaeologists’ Club (YAC) has been the CBA’s flagship youth engagement programme for over forty years. The continued development and support of the network to provide opportunities for young people across the UK and to mitigate barriers to participation is at the heart of our work. However, over the past 4.5 years the CBA has embarked upon the development of its 16+ offer. We are keen to embed young people’s insights into our organisation and outreach projects, our goal is to remove barriers to young people’s participation and facilitate a youth-led approach through our Youth Advisory Board.

The board consists of 12 people, aged 18-25, representing young people from different backgrounds across the UK. Our Young Advisors are passionate about making a change in society, eager to upskill, and use their voice to make a difference at the CBA, in the archaeology and heritage sector, and beyond. As an organisation, there is so much we can learn from young people, and equally, we want to support their own personal development too. We have also established a Young Associate Network (ages 16-25) with a growing membership of 70+ and we are in process of developing a YAC Young Leaders Pathway aimed at 15-17 year-olds. All our project work is developed to mitigate barriers to participation and facilitate sustained and meaningful engagement with our members.

The campaign has two target audiences, volunteers and volunteer organisers. Our aim is to support more people to volunteer in the heritage sector – connecting potential volunteers with opportunities, and to support volunteer organisers to remove barriers and create an inclusive volunteering environment.

Our work to date has included the creation of digital resources, a map of expert inclusion organisations/contacts and blogs shared publicly via the MYM website. This is boosted by regular digital and in-person events, where case studies of inclusive volunteering practises are shared from across the UK. A Team Kinetic portal is key to the campaign, as it is an online platform where heritage groups can promote their volunteer opportunities to new people who they aren’t already connected with. In 2023 the Scottish Government funded the creation of an Inclusive Volunteering Toolkit, which has been published digitally and printed, it is now being brought to life by workshops across Scotland.

Historic England has IDE (inclusion, diversity, and equality) embedded at every level of the organisation, thanks to it being fundamental to our work as part of our Corporate Plan, and driven by core priorities of the Heritage Sector Resilience Plan. Across the organisation we have commitments to both internal and external-facing work that has IDE as a core remit, all the way from improving our own recruitment practices and Board procedures, to delivering projects that develop heritage career opportunities, build sector-leading advice on inclusive governance and spotlight diverse stories through grants such as Everyday Heritage.

Historic England has the ambition to work to ensure that “Everyone can connect with, enjoy and benefit from the historic environment” – and work happens across all of our teams towards this.

The starting point for us was when we received funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to deliver our Unlocking the Power of Communities project in 2020. ‘Unlocking’ was a major development and capacity building project, with one element being the introduction of online training sessions. It soon became clear that our members had varying needs with regard to accessing webinars, so we started to ask them if they had any access requirements during the booking process and introduced Otter.ai which is a live speech to text transcript that connects to Zoom.

At this point, I felt that I would benefit from digital accessibility training with the Disability Collaborative Network which was a huge eye-opener, and I spent the next few months upskilling myself which had a profound effect on my thought process when planning the rest of the project.

Our legacy website wasn’t very accessible and, as a short term solution, we added an overlay widget. Overlay widgets aren’t the be all and end all as they can sometimes make interactive websites less accessible – however this one was a small improvement as it enabled people visiting the website to have it read to them, have the contrast increased and have the text enlarged. Following this we redirected some of the funding towards a digital accessibility audit. This has underpinned everything we’ve done online, including our communications, and I can’t stress how important it’s been. It brought home exactly how inaccessible our website was, from images that did not have alt text so couldn’t be understood by people using screen reading technology, to text with low contrast which couldn’t be identified by people with visual impairments, to badly formatted webpages that were difficult to access by people who do not use a mouse to navigate the Internet and videos with no captions. At the time it seemed like an insurmountable task to put things right, but at this point we’ve fixed as much as we can possibly fix before we start on the development of new website.

The Disability Collaborative Network became an important sounding board for us, and after they’d spoken at one of our Network Natters we met with them to discuss how we could make our annual conference more accessible. The conference was going to be held in Caernarfon North Wales and we knew from the outset that there would be live Welsh to English translation, a quiet space and a prayer room, but we wanted to go much further. Alongside the more obvious accessibility questions to ask when considering potential venues, the DCN’s advice included lots of things we hadn’t thought about such as asking workshop leaders to provide advance information about what they will be expecting delegates to do, what sort of materials lifts are made from, whether there is seating and free water available during tours, where the nearest Changing Places toilet is and if venues accept card, cash or other methods of payment so that people could be prepared. All of this information led to us producing our first ever accessibility guide for a conference and we’ve built on this ever since, now supplying accessibility information for all of our in-person events. We’ve also developed accessibility guidelines for speakers that are preparing presentations for our events and we check those presentations in advance.

In the last 4 years our membership has grown by over 350% and has become much more diverse. We’ve delivered a targeted campaign to almost 50 ‘accidental’ heritage organisations that work with marginalised communities and run training ad advice sessions for them.  The development of a thriving Youth Forum has greatly helped us to include and engage young people who are in the early stages of their career, are students, or simply have an interest in heritage. We have big plans for the Youth Forum which now has over 100 members!

One of my own proudest moments was being invited to speak at the Memberwise Digital Excellence conference in May 2024 on our journey towards being a more inclusive and accessible Network. You can find out more about the work we’ve been doing at https://heritagetrustnetwork.org.uk/our-journey-towards-an-accessible-and-inclusive-network/