Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220 - 226)

TUESDAY 28 MARCH 2006

MR PETER HINTON, MR BRIAN AYERS AND DR MIKE HEYWORTH

  Q220  Helen Southworth: What work needs to be undertaken to draw new people into the profession and to give recognition of skills that develop at different levels?

  Mr Hinton: One of the things that we are working on in partnership with the Archaeology Training Forum is the development of a vocational qualification in archaeological practice which we hope to be launching during the course of this year, which will be made available to professionals and the voluntary sector alike. There does not seem to be a shortage at the moment of people wishing to come into archaeology; rather the opposite. It looks like something like 10% of archaeology graduates go on to practise in the profession. The other 90% go off to pursue other careers. There is a problem in progression through the profession and there is certainly a problem with retention, particularly in the early years of the profession where people find that they are unable to afford to continue. There is more work that needs to be done in terms of helping people to develop their skills, to move on through the profession, and we have been working closely with English Heritage and indeed the HLF over that. The HLF has recently granted a very substantial programme of bursaries to allow people to acquire archaeological skills in the workplace and new people to come into archaeology or to take up new roles in archaeology and learn skills almost in a modern apprenticeship format.

  Dr Heyworth: The key is that we need to look at alternative mechanisms. It has been in the past very much a graduate entry profession. I think now the Archaeology Training Forum (which is another group through which we can all work together) best practice qualification will be a key linked into occupational standards which we have for archaeology and which are a very important benchmark in a sense, and we are well placed now to move forward with that.

  Q221  Philip Davies: I think I am one of the few people who did GCSE archaeology at school, particularly in a state school as well. How important do you think it is that archaeology as a subject is taught in schools for archaeology as a profession and just generally to thrive in this country?

  Dr Heyworth: We think it is critical and it is unfortunate that now nobody can take a GCSE in archaeology because there is not that option any more. One of the difficulties with that was that the numbers taking it were quite limited so the economic argument was that it was not justifiable. The difficulty with that, and in a sense the reason behind that, was that until very recently it was very hard as an archaeology graduate to get into teacher training because archaeology was not defined as a national curriculum subject and so many teacher training colleges would not accept archaeology graduates in for teacher training, which frankly sounds absurd. That now has been catered for, I think, and that was one of the positive outcomes of the campaign that we fought over the GCSE. There are lots of ways in which archaeology can be used within the national curriculum even though archaeology itself is not a recognised course, and certainly there is a lot of work going on linking into what are called hybrid history courses where there is an archaeological dimension in with history linked with the vocational aspects, and again the skills and techniques of archaeology can be used in almost anything. There are some very good examples of teachers from archaeology backgrounds who use archaeology to teach almost every aspect of the curriculum because it is at the end of the day a subject that really fires up kids and there are some fantastic opportunities around to go out of the classroom as well. This is another area where the archaeology and heritage outside the classroom manifesto is something we would all very strongly support. There are a lot of opportunities for young people to get experiences out of the classroom and heritage and the historical environment really offers that.

  Mr Ayers: I think it is worth pointing out that archaeology and the historical environment are local things and it is a way, particularly with children but also with others, of getting people to relate to their local environment and to investigate the world around them. I always remember an excavation which was within an area of fairly dense housing and people visiting the excavation were saying, "I did not know we had any history here", and it was marvellous that people were suddenly waking up to the fact that history is all around them. I have recently been visiting a project in Manchester called Dig Manchester, which has been fantastic and in parts of Manchester the numbers of people coming in and engaging with archaeology has been really quite remarkable. It is not that they are learning to be archaeologists. They are just learning to look at their environment and appreciate it and understand that the place they live is special to them.

  Q222  Chairman: Can you just say a quick word about how you view the activities of English Heritage and HLF in the archaeological area?

  Mr Hinton: We are very concerned, like the previous group you have just taken evidence from, about the level of funding that English Heritage is receiving. We see that as an organisation it has responded to the criticisms in the Quinquennial Review. It certainly seems to us to have become a much more responsive, much more publicly focused, much more outward looking, much more accountable organisation and it is a little bit unclear to us quite what it is now being punished for and the cut in funds is having a real impact on some of the activities we talked about earlier that English Heritage have funded in the past. Its Historic Environment Enabling Programme is a very good source of strategic funding and it is being eroded year on year in terms of the size of the budget but also more and more demands are being made upon that budget, so we are very concerned about that. We do rather feel that English Heritage has been through an enormous amount of upheaval in recent years, no doubt much of it necessary, but we have a feeling now that it has proved itself and it needs to be given an adequate amount of resources and be left alone for a bit and not go through any more turbulence.

  Dr Heyworth: On the HLF, we are very supportive of HLF and certainly believe it should maintain the income stream it has. Perhaps from some of our evidence you will have seen that the number of specific archaeology projects has been quite low within the HLF. That perhaps slightly misrepresents the situation in that a lot of HLF funded projects have archaeology in them and one of those difficulties is how you badge something as archaeology or not, so an awful lot more archaeological work has been undertaken. One of the things that we would certainly want to flag up, certainly from my point of view, is that one of the most valuable parts is the Local Heritage Initiative, which has been a relatively small pot of money, up to £25,000 per application, where people can do very much community based archaeology, and a lot of the active engagement at a local level in the last few years has come up through LHI funded projects. The LHI is due to finish later on this year and we are waiting with bated breath at the moment to see whether there will be some sort of successor programme to that, as we hope there will be. One of the real advantages of LHI is that it has been relatively hands-off from an application bureaucracy point of view and that is certainly something that we want to make sure is maintained in any future programme, which I am sure will be forthcoming. We really would like to see some evidence of what that successor programme is going to be. Certainly in overall terms, as it were, we are a very strong supporter of the HLF.

  Q223  Mr Hall: If I can follow directly on from that, who have you made representations to about the replacement for the initiative?

  Dr Heyworth: We have been speaking to the HLF themselves. As you know, they are going through a programme at the moment of reviewing their own strategy so we have been speaking to them about that, but we have also been engaging with DCMS through the programme they have been working on to try and look at the future shares of the lottery. One of the reasons it is coming to an end is that it was done through the Countryside Agency, so I think there is just a bit of an issue of succession and which organisation is going to pick it up or if the HLF are going to take it back in-house and manage it themselves, so I think they have that dialogue going on internally at the moment.

  Q224  Mr Hall: But the Council for British Archaeology would like to see it replaced with something very similar?

  Dr Heyworth: Absolutely.

  Q225  Mr Hall: A mirror image, if you like?

  Dr Heyworth: The key is to have pots of money that are relatively easy to apply for because a lot of these community groups are not in a position to put together significant bids, and that has certainly been one of the barriers for some organisations, but they are very much enabling grants. Where they work really well is where you have local facilitators and local community archaeologists. That would be another great asset if we could put in place, as there are in some parts of the country, community archaeologist posts funded through the HLF which can support and enhance the work of local community groups, not imposing on them but supporting them and responding to their needs. Certainly in places like York that has been hugely successful and one of the things we have argued that HLF should be looking at is in a sense more capacity building rather than just looking at things as specific projects.

  Q226  Mr Hall: If I can just widen it a little bit, are you concerned that Heritage Lottery Fund trustees and expert opinion are going to be used less in decision-making about lottery grants in future?

  Dr Heyworth: There is this move towards trying to understand what the public want and get the public much more involved in decision-making, and that is something that I think we would want to encourage and support, but I think the key thing is that it is never a replacement for that expert knowledge. One of the difficulties often for the public is how to make an informed judgment and that is where the role of professionals and expert panels becomes so important. We want to make sure that people are making informed choices rather than just using standard vox pop type techniques which may look attractive on the surface but perhaps do not understand the full reality of the situation.

  Mr Hall: I agree with you.

  Chairman: I think that is it. Thank you very much indeed.





 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2006
Prepared 20 July 2006