Achieving And Evidencing Social Impact In An Archaeology-Based Widening Participation Programme
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 29/09/2016

The Higher Education Field Academy (HEFA) is designed to raise educational aspirations, enthusiasm and attainment amongst state-educated and disadvantaged teenagers through participation in archaeological excavation.  Devised in 2005 by Carenza Lewis (then at the University of Cambridge) in collaboration with Aimhigher and now funded by the Universities of Cambridge and Lincoln as part of access agreements with the British government’s Office of Fair Access (OFFA), HEFA involves learners in school years 9, 10 and 12 in setting up, running, recording and writing up a 1m2 excavation which contributes to university research (Lewis 2014a).  The excavation is the central element within a carefully structured, varied and challenging scheme of assessed work in which HEFA learners develop and refine a range of identified and explicitly elicited skills – cognitive, technical, social and personal – vital to success in education and the workplace. More than 5,000 young people have taken part in HEFA since 2005, and central to its success has been the attention given to identifying, assessing, monitoring and reporting on its impact on learners (Lewis 2014b).  HEFA is thus able to demonstrate the capacity of archaeology to build social capital by broadening access to higher education and helping young people gain the skills they need to contribute most to society in the future.  This paper presents the aims, structure and outcomes of the HEFA programme, focussing in particular on the ways in which its impact is identified, measured and fed back to learners, schools and funders. 
 
References:

Lewis, C.  2014a. The Power of Pits: Archaeology, outreach and research in living landscapes. K. Boyle, R. Rabett and C. Hunt (eds) Living in the Landscape. Cambridge, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monograph.  pp 321-338.

Lewis, C. 2014b. ‘Cooler than a trip to Alton Towers’: Assessing the impact of the Higher Education Field Academy 2005-2011. Public Archaeology, Vol 13 (2014), no 4, pp 295-322. DOI 10.1179/1465518715Z.00000000076.

Professor  Carenza Lewis, University of Lincoln