Guest blog from UK National Archives on Sector Leadership
In the spirit of collaboration with the UK National Archives we invited them to write a guest blog for our members on their new leadership strategy:
In 2011, The National Archives took on formal leadership of the archives sector in England, following the closure of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).
10 years on, we took the opportunity in 2021 to review our approach to archives sector leadership to ensure that we were still doing the best we could to support archives. We commissioned an independent and comprehensive survey of the sector to gather feedback on where we have succeeded in our leadership role and where we need to focus our attention going forward to make improvements. Over 140 people responded to the survey and a further 100 stakeholders were consulted during the process.
The results were positive and the sector wanted us to continue in our leadership role. As always though, there is room for improvement and the sector helped us identify how we can be bolder, more ambitious and more effective. In our leadership statement, we have explained more fully the areas where we will be focusing our efforts, but in summary, the sector wanted us to develop three aspects of our work:
Sector leadership across The National Archives
We are developing our leadership role as an organisational responsibility, not a departmental one, by embedding our leadership role more fully within The National Archives’ own strategy, Archives for Everyone 2023-27. Going forward, we will do more to draw on expertise from across the organisation, not primarily the Archive Sector Leadership department.
Advocacy
We are making it clearer where we will act and where others are best placed to. For example, we can’t get involved in political lobbying as a government department and we won’t lead on issues where the role of the ARA as the professional body is paramount, such as pay, personal conditions or professionally supporting individual archivists. However, there are lots of areas where we are best placed to advocate for the support of archives both within and beyond the wider cultural heritage sector, and we will continue this work with refreshed effort through a new advocacy strategy in the near future.
Partnerships
We will be forming a UK-wide archive sector leadership and engagement network with counterparts in the Home Nations to identify collaboration and funding opportunities. We will also be deepening our strategic relationships with other leadership voices like Arts Council England and funders like the National Lottery Heritage Fund to advocate for a more resilient archive sector.
One of our most important and closest partnerships is with the ARA, and we have just signed a new collaboration agreement detailing many existing and new areas of work together. Workforce development is one of the cornerstones of this collaboration, following the recent workforce mapping survey where The National Archives and the ARA were both partners alongside CILIP. We are both committed to upskilling and diversifying the archive workforce through a variety of approaches. We are currently working on aligning our training programmes on subjects such as conservation, digital and leadership skills and are jointly looking for opportunities to strengthen and use ARA’s Competency Framework to aid archivists’ professional development. We are leading on the launch of the first Level 7 Archivist and Records Manager apprenticeships and have been working closely with the ARA on finding trainers and assessors, as well as bringing about cultural change by promoting the value of apprenticeships to employers.
Archive Service Accreditation remains a longstanding pillar of our work together, as we continue to implement the scheme as a group of seven national organisations and develop accreditation further through its ten-year review. The ARA is also exploring the possibility of new national partners within the UK and Ireland.
As partners, we aim to provide a co-ordinated approach to the challenges faced by the archive and record keeping sector. To achieve this, we will be collecting and sharing data with each other wherever possible so that we can map the impact of archives and advocate for their support. In the case of records at risk, we have already set up a Records at Risk Fund that both partners have contributed to and this forms part of our refreshed funding offer to address the areas where archive professionals have requested support, including organisational resilience grants and skills bursaries.
There are lots of other improvements in the pipeline and we’ll keep you informed of these. Communication is another area where we’ll be enhancing our collaborative work, co-ordinating announcements and sharing more content across each other’s channels to help you get the information you need when you need it. If you have any feedback in the meantime, please remember that it doesn’t need to be a ten-year review to get in touch – we’d love to hear from you about how we can support the sector better any time: asd@nationalarchives.gov.uk