SKILLS FOR THE FUTURE EVALUATION: FOCUS ON WORKFORCE DIVERSITY

Tender description

HLF invests in the full breadth of the UK's heritage and, through our funding, we aim to make a lasting difference for heritage and people. This is reflected in the outcomes for heritage, people and communities which underpin our grant-making. HLF has invested in three rounds of Skills for the Future funding since 2009. A total of 111 projects have received funding (54 in 2009 - Cohort 1, 39 in 2012 - Cohort 2 and 18 in 2016 - Cohort 3) and 66 projects have completed. The grant programme was a strategic response to the impact of the recession, designed to put the heritage sector in a stronger position for recovery. It recognised the need for targeted employer-led interventions to deliver key heritage skills, sometimes what are niche skills needed by relatively small numbers of people in the heritage economy. The Skills for the Future programme built on the successful delivery of our smaller-scale Training Bursaries programme and both have sought to ensure the future sustainability of heritage through the supply of a skilled and more diverse workforce. The majority of the budget in a Skills for the Future project is dedicated to bursaries for trainees and direct training costs. The aims of the Skills for the Future programme are to: • fund high quality work based training opportunities to equip people with the skills to pursue a career in heritage; • meet identified skills shortages and gaps in the heritage sector; • enhance the capacity of the heritage sector to deliver sustainable training and share good practice; and • increase the diversity of the heritage workforce. For HLF, the lack of diversity in the current heritage workforce is a major concern. To reflect this, the outcome 'more people and a wider range of people will have engaged with heritage' was weighted in assessment of the applications to the Skills for the Future programme in 2016. Priority was given to projects which set ambitious and credible targets for the recruitment and support of trainees who will broaden the workforce profile of individual organisations and the heritage sector in the longer-term. Interim evaluation with Cohort 2 Project Managers has shown that "the Skills for the Future programme has gone some way towards encouraging organisations to focus their efforts on attracting non-traditional candidates into the heritage sector. There are clear examples of success in attracting diverse groups." Nevertheless, challenges remain. A review of project evaluation reports (produced by grantees before completing projects), which we commissioned in 2016, noted that "evidence on progress towards the 'workforce diversity' strand of the programme is insufficient to draw clear conclusions on whether this aim has been achieved. THE FULL HLF OVERVIEW AND TENDER DESCRIPTION ARE SET OUT IN THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT.