Enabling continued professional development
AIM Hallmarks of Prospering Museums
Archaeology Skills Passport
Historic England’s heritage skills learning provision
ACE partnerships and support provision
Historic Houses; private owners and commercial networks
Heritage Open Days as a knowledge network
Charity and local authority partnerships
Knowledge resources for freelancers
The interviews and questionnaires analysis brought to the fore an emerging theme first presented in literature. The issue of unconnected knowledge artefacts to training provision, and the issue of unconnected training sessions to a more comprehensive professional development plan. The author looked at two schemes that buck that patchy trend and instead plan more thoroughly: the Association of Independent Mu-seum’s (AIM) Hallmarks scheme, and the Archaeology Skills Passport scheme. Then two vital streams of knowledge curating work are examined, provided by the two lead-ing English support organisations: Historic England and the Arts Council England. Finally, the support approach of the Historic Houses, and a positive exception to local museum management are examined, before looking at knowledge provision as a package by Creative New Zealand, the equivalent to the Arts Council England.
AIM Hallmarks of Prospering Museums: The Association of Independent Museums (AIM) was positively and regularly mentioned during the research interviews (chapter 4). AIM is a membership charity and registered company, established in 1977, due to the increase and continuing move of museums to independent status. It is a key sup-port organisation, assisting the improvement of data (recommendation 15 of the Men-doza review (Mendoza, 2018)), and has managed a range of programmes including the ACE funded (2015-2018) AIM Hallmarks of Prospering museums (AIM, 2022a). The AIM Hallmarks scheme has two fundamental functions in relation to this re-search, firstly as a joint-up package of knowledge resources, and secondly as benchmarks. The scheme has nine Hallmark sections, aiming to cover the breadth of museum activities (Figure 7 7).
This research’s operational framework was signifi-cantly influenced by the Hallmark set up, but it needed to be more granular, so in this research it has four headline objectives and four core operational areas (drums) in each instead. Another key difference between the two designs is that the operational framework in this research is operational, whilst the Hallmarks headings include some operations such as collections and finance, alongside concepts such as innovation and tackling inequality, making it harder to apply or measure. The Hallmarks scheme astutely points out that museums focusing on individual Hallmarks will be able to im-prove, and as the Hallmarks are interdependent the organisations need to achieve a certain minimum standard across all Hallmarks. In a comprehensive approach, the Hallmark set-up offers a joined-up provision of knowledge resources; each Hallmark has a set of knowledge artefacts, and associated formal and informal training is then provided proactively, and when the need arises. Whilst some knowledge resources are freely available, it is unclear how much the need for paid membership hinders the utilisation of the whole provision as a continued professional development package. Furthermore, the Hallmark is utilised by the AIM team, but since its funded project ended, lack of capacity seems a barrier to fully operate it. Similarly to the Hallmarks, the interdependence of objectives (and their operations) is a fundamental element of the organisational sustainability concept in this research. The Hallmarks’ joined-up package approach has been built-in and expanded in the development of the knowledge curating design for the wider ecosystem of cultural heritage. The second relevant function of Hallmarks is its benchmarking. The scheme is based on an aspi-rational benchmarking approach, looking not for break-even or baseline level, but in-stead at prospering organisations. The amalgamation of operations and concepts in the Hallmarks, and the lack of data and a common measurable framework in the cultural heritage ecosystem, make it impossible to benchmark effectively. This research relates the knowledge curating design to performance and to continued professional development as a double loop for benchmarking and feedback on organisational learning (Argyris, 1990; Argyris and Schön, 1978). Parallel work, such as the Culture and Heritage Capital programme, is key therefore, to provide that com-mon language, data, and benchmarks for which the knowledge curating design sits in the middle of, as the enabler.
Archaeology Skills Passport: Another significant provision of a joined-up continued professional development scheme is the Archaeology Skills Passport scheme, which was mentioned by one of the interview participants, ‘… It’s a simple logbook and way of showing competency as a field archaeologist. Wish I’d had this when I was in the field’ (Participant U3). The Archaeology Skills Passport (Figure 7 8) is provided by the British Archaeology Jobs and Resources (BAJR, yes, pronounced badger) (BAJR, 2025).
It complements the provision of the Chartered Institute of Archaeology whose resources focus on professional ethics and compliance, by focussing on training across 167 skills. A wide range of guides are available for free (Figure 7 9); these are developed and maintained by specialist professionals who develop them for free to share their knowledge, and potentially to promote themselves. The passport can be purchased for £8.50, which covers the cost of the scheme.
The passport links to the guides for the required skills and has two core benefits: allows the user to see what skills gaps they have, and enables them to provide evidence of acquired skills when applying for jobs. It therefore gives a record and motivation for a career-long professional development (pers. comm. BAJR, 2024). Building on the findings on the lack of training budgets and increased number of self-employed freelancers, such an approach would provide knowledge continuity, not just for organisations, but for individuals too. Whether people enter cultural heritage through volunteering, university, or other background, a knowledge curating design needs to be accessible to individuals, not just through institutional channels. And to provide a means for tracking professional development and improvement. The usefulness of the scheme for the knowledge design is that knowledge resources (knowledge artefacts, training, and support) based on a common operational framework become transferable. Individuals can prove their knowledge and skills in a new organisation or habitat, and potentially adjust and settle in quicker to a new organisation with a familiar operational knowledge structure. Combining the ideas of the AIM Hallmarks and the skills passport, the curating knowledge design can provide a common operational frame-work with specific skill capabilities developed for each operation.
Historic England’s heritage skills learning provision: Historic England is the pub-lic body managing the Historic Environment in England. Historic England was previ-ously known as ‘Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England’ and then English Heritage. Renamed as Historic England in 2015, it manages the regulatory element of Historic Environment in England, and is the sole trustee of the separate English Heritage Trust which manages the historic sites. Historic England manages the Listing process, ‘Heritage at Risk’ programme, ‘High Streets Heritage Action Zones’ programme, ‘Heritage Schools’, and the extensive Historic England Archive. Historic England provides annual grants and subsidy, commissions the VisitEngland heritage attractions survey, and in 2023 Historic England launched the National Blue Plaques Scheme (Historic England, 2024c, 2021b, 2021c).
‘We are also building our evidence base to deepen our understanding of heritage’s impact on place through initiatives such as Heritage Counts and the Culture and Heritage Capital Programme.’ (Historic England, 2024c, p. 23)
Historic England provides an invaluable breadth of high-quality resources on the management of historic environment, generally downloadable and available for free, or printed books available to purchase. These include advice and guidance, re-search magazines and reports, and a books’ series (Figure 7 10) (Historic England, 2025).
Historic England’s knowledge artefacts are available to users under the Open Gov-ernment Licence, developed by the National Archives (The National Archives, 2025a). User participants in this research did not appear aware of this, as the open licence is not prominently mentioned, and such publications normally credit the third-party ex-perts and consultants who develop them.
The Historic England’s knowledge artefacts are supplemented into a comprehensive package of knowledge resources through learning and training provision, networking programmes (Knowledge Hub), and by financing the Historic Environment Forum. Historic England’s training programme includes extensive heritage (building, construction, and conservation) skills and continued professional development pro-gramme. The training provides physical courses and an expanding range of e-learning, including a micro-learning library, as ‘… an educational method that empha-sises learning in small, easily digestible units’ (Historic England, 2024d). The eLearn-ing is now based on a Learning Management System (LMS) which helps to automate the process, can run eight asynchronous courses simultaneously, and made the crea-tion and use of traditional content more widely accessible across the ecosystem (pers. comm. Historic England). The training programme is networked with the Histor-ic Environment Forum and through the Heritage Workspace (Branson et al., 2024) which is a community-of-practice network build on the Knowledge Hub platform (Placecube, 2022). The Heritage Workspace has a social-media page for each group, alongside library, events, news, and a wiki page. It is evident that the provision of knowledge artefacts, training and network platforms utilise internal and already avail-able software systems, which can carry a centralised look and limitations in function-ality. With this in mind, the cultural policy to uplift digital capabilities across the user organisations’ ecosystem, has to be a consideration for providers too; support organi-sations need to have greater processual freedom and funding to set up and maintain high quality and up-to-date digital infrastructure to benefit the ecosystem. This ought to be an economy of scale policy decision, which would be more impactful and logical use of public and grant funding, than individual, short term digital projects. And as a partnership with other cultural organisations, it could combine existing creative and artistic expertise in learning, suitable for wider learning styles. The knowledge re-sources package being provided, considering the budget limitations which a non-departmental public body probably has, is admirable, and potentially undervalued and underpromoted. Any knowledge curating design partnership for the cultural heritage ecosystem, including creative industries, arts, and associated historic environment and nature knowledge resources, should be built upon this foundation by Historic England, or would risk duplicating efforts or losing out on vital existing know-how knowledge. Historic England’s work on the Culture and Heritage Capital project was discussed in section 7.1, and its pilot project on the utilisation of AI is included in the upcoming technology section.
ACE partnerships and support provision: The Arts Council England (ACE) has responsibility for collections and cultural property, combined arts, libraries, literature, museums, music, theatre, and visual arts. It manages key programmes, including the Accreditation Scheme for museums and galleries in partnership with the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland governments, and for the National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) (ACE, 2025a), the Investment Principles Support Organisations (IPSO) (ACE, 2025b), and the Museum Development programme (MD) (ACE, 2025c). Other of its programmes include tax incentives for acquisition, the export licensing for ‘items of particular cultural significance’, the Government Indemnity Scheme (exhibitions’ art and cultural objects insurance scheme), the Designation Scheme (identifying ‘the best collections held in museums, libraries and archives across England’) and the Subject Specialist Networks (SSNs) (ACE, 2025a, 2022b). The accreditation scheme has been a key element of the data analysis, and the variations in its impact are examined in the following section.
First, the other key package of interest in relation to the knowledge curating design involves the networks in the programmes highlighted in the previous para-graph, the NPOs, IPSOs, MD, and SSNs. One key strength of the NPO, IPSO, and MD programmes is the longer funding cycle, of normally four years. The investment on NPOs and IPSOs forms the majority of the Art’s Council’s budget. The Relationship Framework sets the working ways guidance and the funded organisations link with the Arts Council through regional relationship managers. It is common for NPOs to take on a supporting role for other smaller organisations, similar to the leadership and supporting role expected of the government-funded national museums and galler-ies to provide. On the other hand, IPSOs tend to be smaller organisations, their po-tential strength for contributing to the knowledge curating design being their coverage across the ecosystem’s habitats (Figure 7 11) and objectives across the operational drums (Figure 7 12).
The Museum Development programme was highly praised by the research participants for their knowledgeable regional teams. It provides small pots of support-ive funding and a wide range of knowledge resources, which have been developed and managed at individual websites, producing more regionally-related content but also potentially duplicating some of the work. The MD structure in England was re-configured in 2024, from nine regional teams down to five, which correspond more naturally to the equivalent five regions of the Arts Council England. A programme manager role was also created within the Arts Council, which enables a stronger co-ordination and effectiveness of the programmes across the regions ((ACE, 2025c; Museum Development Network, 2024), (pers. comm. Museum Development, 2024)). The Museum Development programmes provide strong personal support and guid-ance for the accreditation scheme, which as shown in the findings of chapter 6, has complementarity opportunities with the education award. Across the NPO, IPSO, and MD schemes, there is a vast amount of tacit and explicit knowledge within the members, and another understated and hidden layer of knowledge is within the NPO relationship officers, Museum Development officers, and all similar roles.
The SSN Consortium represents over 30 SSNs, to ‘support the development, use and wider understanding of collections by sharing knowledge, expertise, and re-sources with people working with collections’ (ACE, 2025d; Subject Specialist Network Consortium, 2022). Behind the wealth of expertise within these networks, the collective resources are found through a web of interconnected links, as ‘every net-work is expected to maintain an accessible platform for exchange’ (Collections Trust, 2025b). The consortium itself and many of its networks appear to have limited capaci-ty for maintain platforms and their content. The networks could be a significant source of both experience and recorded knowledge in a knowledge curating design, whilst aiming to reduce their administrative workload (looking at their websites it is clear there is little capacity to individually maintain them).
Overall, there is extensive networking and supportive partnership working across these invaluable schemes, but the development and dissemination of knowledge resources is fragmented, not strategically joined-up.
Historic Houses; private owners and commercial networks: partnerships between cultural heritage and commercial organisations are logical sustainable options, as such collaboration would help businesses to broaden their social, cultural and envi-ronmental values (Dzhengiz, 2020; Manžuch, 2011). A key support network to under-stand , is Historic Houses (formally known as Historic Houses Association (HHA)), which works closely with businesses and provides a corporate membership (Historic Houses, 2024) (Figure 7 13).
Historic Houses is a not-for-profit business association with 85,000 visitor members, representing 1,400 independently owned historic hous-es, castles, parks and gardens across the UK. It leads the support provision to private owners of heritage; its purpose is to strengthen the ongoing care and protection of these places, by ensuring that their owners have access to the advice and support that they need to undertake their work. The support includes policy representation, technical advice, learning, networking, marketing, and commercial schemes. The house owners as members ‘enjoy unrivalled access to the UK’s largest and most up-to-date archive of expertise on every topic related to looking after historic houses’ (Historic Houses, 2025b). Knowledge resources are mainly accessible through the Historic Houses website, its quarterly magazine, to which members can contribute, and through a range of experienced private owners and commercial experts. It is closely associated with the Historic Houses Foundation, whose constitution object is the preservation of significant buildings, gardens and their collections (HHF charity commission, 2022; Historic Houses Association, 2022). As generally there is no visi-bility of what resources each membership organisation provides, the author is grateful to Historic Houses for providing insight to their membership content. In summary, His-toric Houses offers the following resources for its members:
• A members-only area of the website, where advice and guidance material can be found;
• A programme of webinars and events designed to support owners;
• A Slack channel, for members to record their queries and concerns;
• A quarterly magazine, full of case study materials and advice notes;
• A ‘Next Generation Hub’ offering tailored support for the Next Generation membership (pers. comm. Historic Houses).
Historic Houses takes a strong intergenerational role, with 300 associate and next generation members; these are family members of the owners, who also support the work of the association (Figure 7 14).
Alongside the visitor, private heritage owners’, and next generation membership, His-toric Houses has 250 corporate members and works with a number of major compa-nies, who sponsor the association’s work and also offer advice and guidance to the 1,400 member properties on estate management, education, insurance, investment, legal and tax requirements, security, and so on (Figure 7 15). Its corporate sponsors include:
Legal firms;
Insurance brokers;
Accountants specialising in high value estates;
Investment advisers;
Experts in land and estates.
Curating privately owned collections, rather than public, is not as compatible with the ACE accreditation requirements, making it difficult to gain accreditation, with fewer than 20 out of the 1,400 Historic House members being accredited (pers. comm. Historic Houses). Indeed, from the owners of private heritage that participated in this research only three had accreditation. Considering the large volume of privately owned heritage and their expert network, alongside the benefits of accreditation, here appears a two-way knowledge curating opportunity: 1) accreditation to complement the tacit experiential knowledge of private owners and commercial providers, and 2) private and commercial operations to enhance the accreditation formal resources.
Heritage Open Days as a knowledge network: Hundreds of heritage sites that are no longer private, including historic houses, are managed by the National Trust (for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and separately the National Trust for Scotland). A small National Trust team manages the Heritage Open Days scheme, the nation’s ‘largest festival of history and culture’, for the whole ecosystem (Heritage Open Days, 2025a). The role of the scheme for sharing knowledge resources is extremely im-portant but understated. The team manage all the co-ordinating activities, and the re-sources that participating organisations need to manage their event, including event templates, and support with press releases and other marketing ((Heritage Open Days, 2025b). The Heritage Open Days has a wealth of knowledge artefacts available in its knowledge hub through its website, with useful filtering options for searching by information type, topic of interest, and by year, back to 2016 (Heritage Open Days, 2025b). Participating organisations can access further resources and support once they join in (pers. comm. Heritage Open Days). The knowledge interaction within the scheme flows across three directions; firstly, the participating organisations link with other similar or local organisations, secondly the National Trust as a host interacts with the participating organisations, and thirdly the Heritage Open Days team itself is a continually developing source of tacit knowledge, through its interaction with both participating organisations and the National Trust systems and sites. As with the NPO, IPSOs, and MD officers, there is an invaluable pool of knowledge within a small number of people. In the discussion chapter this is followed up as an opportunity, but also a risk of losing knowledge as people leave.
Charity and local authority partnerships: As seen in the literature and from partici-pating sites, it is increasingly common for charities to manage local authority-owned historic buildings and collections. The inductive and deductive analyses show that in general the knowledge artefacts and organisational sustainability performance are moderated by the limited resources of the charity, and the processual limitations and reduced budgets associated with local authorities. One participating site, however stood out during the statistical analysis, with much above average high volumes of present (95.00%) and updated knowledge artefacts (53.33%), and high performance (68.75%). In investigating the phenomenon, the partnership in that site is reverse; the building and collection are owned by a charity, and are managed by the local authority. The charity appears to do well what charities do, raise charitable funds for collections and the building, and the council has broader access to the expertise and knowledge artefacts needed to manage the operations. The museum has relative processual freedom, having set up its own separate website from the council’s one, and its daily operations are managed by a small team of staff and volunteers (pers. comm. Partici-pating museum QU98). The site charges a modest admission fee, and whilst it is not covering all its costs without a council budget contribution, the governance set up of such a partnership appears to sustainably produce high levels of knowledge artefacts and performance.
Knowledge resources for freelancers: The analysis (chapters 4,5,6) highlighted that alongside curating operational knowledge, a knowledge curating design needs to provide for the large number of freelancers too. This group is particularly vulnerable, with little job or financial security (Dent et al., 2023; Walmsley et al., 2021) and has fewer avenues to access knowledge resources. One excellent provision of knowledge resources for freelancers has been developed by Creative New Zealand, the equiva-lent of the Arts Council in the UK (Creative New Zealand, 2025a). The Sustainable careers webpages provide knowledge resources across three themes; make connec-tions, navigate the law, and navigate your personal finances. Each theme has an ini-tial introductory short film, supplemented by links to associated resources and web-sites. These are all usefully grouped in sub-themes and accompanied by one or two explanatory sentences, making them brief and user-friendly. One subtheme has links to networks and support organisations, whilst longer films are available further down the webpages providing more detail as needed. It is all freely accessible, down-loadable PDFs, and all the weblinks worked (Creative New Zealand, 2025b).
We have so far seen admirable examples of knowledge resource provision. The earlier analysis showed much variation in the operational knowledge curation and performance. One scheme with extensive variation across the demographic forms was accreditation, which is being examined next.
