Heritage Sector Workforce Diversity Research - AWARD

As part of our Inclusion Strategy 2021-2023, Historic England is committed to undertaking research into the Heritage sector, in order to understand the demographic make-up of its workforce, to create an evidence base for our sector-wide work, and to help us address some of the barriers to entering the sector. The results will also help inform our understanding and approaches to other actions on the Inclusion Strategy.

The Heritage sector consists of a complex ecosystem of organisations that range from small scale charities relying on volunteers to national and regional level organisations bodies with significant number of employees. While some organisations are currently collecting evidence on diversity of their workforce and volunteers there is no common repository of data available to facilitate national level understanding of diversity in the heritage workforce and subsequently support policy actions to improve it at organisational level.

We are looking for an experienced Researcher to design an approach to undertaking the first phase of this research with the support of the Historic England Inclusion Team.

Through this research, we are hoping to answer the following 3 questions:

• oWhat does the workforce of the Heritage sector currently look like?
• oHow does this compare with the demographic make-up of England?
• oWhat does the workforce in the Heritage sector look like with regard to different job roles?

Historic England's strategy for Inclusion, Diversity and Equality has identified a series of priority groups as we know that these people are currently under-represented in our workforce and are less likely to engage with our work:

• people with Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic Heritage;
• people who identify as LGBTQ+;
• young people under 25;
• people with disabilities;
• people who are disadvantaged by their social and/or economic background or circumstances, or by where they live

We would like the research to clearly identify and quantify how these groups are represented in the workforce of the Heritage sector.

The purpose of this research is therefore to:

• oProvide the Heritage sector with robust and detailed data about its workforce (including unpaid governance roles)
• oTo inform Historic England's priorities and pathways forward with the Inclusion Strategy

A future phase of the research, not covered in this brief, will seek to further Historic England's understanding of the barriers faced by those from our priority demographics through qualitative research.

Further information available in the Tender Document.