‘Cooler than a trip to Alton Towers’: Assessing the Impact of the Higher Education Field Academy, 2005–13

Abstract

The Higher Education Field Academy (HEFA) is a University of Cambridge ‘Widening Participation’ programme designed to raise educational aspirations, enthusiasm, and attainment amongst teenagers through participation in archaeological excavation. Setting up, running, recording, and writing up a 1 m² excavation which contributes to university research is structured into a varied and challenging scheme of assessed work in which learners develop and refine a range of skills — cognitive, technical, social, and personal — vital to success in education and the workplace. A total of 3496 young people took part in HEFA between 2005 and 2013, and central to its success are characteristics unique to archaeology: an interdisciplinary subject in which novices can make discoveries for themselves which are genuinely both new and important. At a time of financial retrenchment when funding for heritage is being severely cut, HEFA demonstrates the capacity of archaeology to build social capital by broadening access to higher education and helping young people gain the qualifications they need to contribute most to society in the future. This paper assesses the origins, aims, structure, and impact of the HEFA programme 2005–13, focusing in particular on the ‘Aimhigher years’ from 2005–11.

Keywords:

• excavation
• widening participation
• schools
• education
• Aimhigher

Acknowledgements

In a project such as this, thanks are due to literally thousands of people, far too numerous to name individually, including school learners and teachers, owners of excavation sites, and local coordinators, without whose participation and support HEFA would be impossible. Special thanks are due to Sandy Yatteau of Aimhigher who approved the first HEFA pilot in 2005; to Catherine Ranson, Clemency Cooper, Paul Blinkhorn, and Jessica Rippengal who have worked in key roles on HEFA for many years, and to Graeme Barker and James Barrett at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research for their institutional support. I am also grateful to those who commented on earlier versions of this paper for their valuable insights, although the opinions expressed here and any errors remain, of course, entirely my responsibility. HEFA has been funded by Aimhigher, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), English Heritage, and the University of Cambridge Admissions Office, as well as numerous smaller local groups, and the support of all these is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. Detailed discussion of the research context of the HEFA excavations (Lewis, 2007a; 2010) is beyond the scope of this paper, but it can be noted here that improving our understanding of CORS is a recognized research priority (Wade, 2000; Oake, et al., 2007). Test-pit excavation is suitable for investigating CORS because other techniques such as field-walking or open-area excavations are not possible on land that is built up and divided into relatively small plots held in multiple private ownership (e.g. Jones & Page, 2006; Gerrard & Aston, 2008).

2. Here, SATs refers to standardized tests in the UK for children at the ages of 11 and 14. GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) are exams sat at age 16 in a range of school subjects in the UK.

3. Throughout this paper, comments from HEFA learners and staff are anonymized for publication, identified here only by initial and date.

4. An alternative trip to a rollercoaster theme park on offer to students from this school.

5. Information about the Office of Fair access and their work for ensuring equal access to higher education can be found on their website at: <http://www.offa.org.uk/>.

6. Schools were prioritized using a combination of POLAR2 postcode data, GCSE attainment, and ‘value added’ indices from published government league tables, with selected samples then compared with rankings based on local knowledge from Aimhigher to check the validity of this method.

7. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the contribution the HEFA test-pit data are making to our understanding of the past, but these are summarized each year as the archaeological data have accumulated year on year (Lewis, 2005; 2006; 2007b; 2008; 2009; 2011b; 2012; 2013; see also <http://www.access.arch.cam.ac.uk/reports>) and are the subject of ongoing research (e.g. Lewis, 2007a; 2010; in preparation).