Heritage on the curriculum, out of the classroom

Historic England has helped schools and heritage organisations connect to create powerful learning opportunities

Heritage Schools is a large and well-known programme, which has run since 2012, with clusters of schools in 15 regions of England. It is delivered by Historic England, with money allocated from central government and was inspired in part by the RSA’s work exploring area-based curricula. Sandra Stancliffe, head of education and inclusion at Historic England explains that:

“Heritage Schools is at its core a teacher training programme, enabling teachers to find out about the place they are based. Few teachers have grown up in the place they teach, so there is a built-in disconnect. So if they are teaching about great women in Victorian history they might ring up the local museum and say “have you got anything on Florence Nightingale?”, whereas there are likely to be local heroines with whom young people can feel a stronger connection with — visiting their home or their grave.”

As a participant at one of our workshops noted: “Schools buy textbooks in bulk, nationally, so there’s few localised (or ‘Bristolised’) education resources.” As the evaluation of Heritage Schools concluded, the value of tangibly saving teachers’ time by providing knowledge of the area and information about who to contact is hugely important in its success.

In Bristol, the programme, where 25 schools participate, Historic England worked with City Sightseeing open top bus tours around Southmead, a suburb with little tangible designated built heritage, but Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show there in 1891 (now site of the Memorial Stadium). Students at local schools were inspired to learn whip-cracking.

“This is about changing curriculum — you need to be open to concepts — it’s not a project. Because the knowledge and learning is place based, you can’t ‘un-know’ it — it is reinforced because you walk past it every day.”

Evaluation data demonstrates the successes: the proportion of children learning outside the classroom at least once per term goes from a quarter to over half; the proportion who understand how their local heritage relates to the national story doubles; and the proportion of teachers confident in using local heritage to help deliver the curriculum triples — from a quarter to three quarters. As Sandra reports: “The best schools now see it as ‘just what they do’.” There is the potential for inspiration across the education sector.

“Local heritage is a resource on the doorstep of the school. And all schools should take advantage of that. Any school can be a heritage school — because every school, every community and every local area has a story to tell. There are always going to be changes and developments to the curriculum. But the story is always going to be there.”

Lois Gyves, Heritage Schools Programme Manager

Through this work, Historic England has demonstrated the value that partnerships can bring to enrich learning, connecting heritage to local identity.

In Bristol, the council’s City Design department trained local teachers in the use of Our Place, a toolkit to enable local communities assess the character of their neighbourhood. Characterisation involves identifying any important historic places or buildings and defining what makes an area special. Teachers learned the mapping and annotating techniques used.

Four schools benefited from working directly with a local planner and an architect. Children walked around their neighbourhood annotating maps identifying characteristics such as tree groups, roof lines, noise levels, views and green spaces. The students researched more on Bristol’s Know Your Place website, and produced an exhibition of displays and models relating to the local area, past, present and future.

Given that heritage education is not a revenue generator, the pressure to creative a viable proposition is acute, and therefore partnerships should seek to identify win-wins, to create social value in multiple ways. For example, by training volunteer police cadets to perform heritage crime risk assessments, pressure on police time is reduced, while making historic assets more secure — with young people learning more about local heritage as well.

Such collaborative efforts are generated by local networks which allow heritage organisations — and those outside the heritage sector — to understand mutual needs, and build relationships strong enough to sustain innovation and experimentation.