48 CONTEXT 177 : SEPTEMBER 2023 to sign up as a ‘supporter’ and pay the fee. There is a great deal of financial assistance available to minimise such barriers too, as listed on our website. We do, if discreetly, offer an option to seek alternative assessment procedures for those who might need them. But can we not do more to address a hurdle that for some smacks more of glass ceiling than assessment of competence? Yes: and we are looking at offering more obvious and substantial support for routes into membership, while always being open to discussion on such matters when raised with us. To lay the groundwork here, with our education, training and application support officer Anna Hart, we are looking to formalise the options for applicants to explore alternative assessment processes for Affiliate membership, so that we can still determine abilities without undermining standards. We should do this for reasons of inclusion and fairness, but also because (as we know from Barbie’s movie) disqualifying anyone (even Ken) using only a glass ceiling, undermines our own wider ambitions to do our job well. Though our agenda is not the commerce of plastic dolls and all the carbon and phthalates they might entail, the fundamentals are no different. In line with that perhaps in-part subconscious awareness, the IHBC opened access to conservation practice standards outside its then regulatory norm of ‘conservation officer’ when the institute was established out of the old Association of Conservation Officers more than a quarter of a century ago. That was when we broke our first glass ceiling: tied to government roles, but also to the single-discipline concept of a specialist practice so embedded in thinking that even our historic standard, the 1993 ICOMOS Guidelines, could not register it. For us, in formal assessment – that is, to become Affiliate (unaccredited) or to be accredited as Associate or Full Member – applicants need only to demonstrate their skills, knowledge and understanding of conservation across the IHBC’s eight practice activities (the competences) or the corresponding four generic activities (our conservation cycle). So anyone who demonstrates a suitable level of conservation abilities to us, in line with our models, can enter our rather wide tent, while things such as job titles, roles and backgrounds are as irrelevant as family or business connections, awards, honorary titles and so on. We are not alone in this, but as a body that welcomes specialist and even non-specialist interests from all backgrounds, smashing glass ceilings has been a bit of a tradition in the IHBC. Many will remember how surprised Baroness Andrews was when she launched the Guildford School, with her off-thecuff welcome of the gender balance in the audience. We have also made huge efforts to render the original Full member category more accessible – with now, evolved over some 20 years, a linked learning pathway through open Supporter, assessed Affiliate and accredited Associate categories, available for those interested in following that route. This way, acquiring the conservation accreditation is tied to neither legacy, role nor discipline. Again there is no structural barrier to trade, craft or even skilled volunteers entering the IHBC’s membership in one form or another, so we have enabled the smashing of more ceilings. We at least cracked some glass ceilings when we started up as a professional body spanning disciplines, and specifically supporting specialists with multi-disciplinary and crossdisciplinary skills. No doubt that was also part of a millennial Zeitgeist that looked to addressing complex sustainability and climate challenges. However, the limited formal recognition of that model makes it increasingly clear that the historic compartmentalisation of disciplines still reigns strong. By extension it is clear that conservation would benefit from a better recognition of its own intrinsic nature. We have been gently affirming that special aspect of our practice across our history, through the competences as noted above, and the aligned, generic ‘areas of competence’, and subsumed in our first modern Corporate Plan, agreed in 2007. There we agreed the description of our understanding of conservation as being ‘multi-disciplinary in character, inter-disciplinary in scope, and pan-disciplinary in aspiration’. We reinforced that ambition with the agreement there on our ambition ‘to establish the IHBC as the universally-recognised professional face of historic environment conservation… to secure the most sustainable benefits for and from our historic places through the contribution of the membership of the IHBC to place-making’. Language modulates with refinement, but the same spirit extends into our 2020 Corporate Plan, which ‘recognises that the future of historic fabric and places is best served by recognised and skilled conservation specialists’. The question for our members today, as we look to petitioning for a charter, is not so much the principle of ambitions already agreed, as the best route to achieve them now – including the matter of glass ceilings. Is it through such a petition, successful or otherwise? Barbie had her own daunting quest to smash ceilings thrust on her, including the appearance of cellulite as a sign of the potentially damaging invasion of the ‘real world’. The IHBC’s members and our sector stakeholders now have the chance to look strategically at how we might best enhance our own charitable and public interests in conservation practice, starting out with our recent discussions and surveys of thought and issues. Do let us know yours, most easily by following the links on our IHBC Petition for Charter website. Seán O’Reilly, director@ihbc.org.uk
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