18 YEARBOOK 2025 Members are also beginning to see more substantial references to The Conservation Cycle, our core framework for assessing and supporting interdisciplinary conservation practice. Although long embedded in our accreditation process, the cycle is now being brought to the forefront and featured in publications, guidance and communications, to help members as they maintain accreditation through continuing professional development (CPD). Our support for accreditation also includes delivering accessible, local and cost-effective CPD. This has helped sharpen our support for the training and accreditation events that our branches supply, and the impact is being seen already. In the last year especially, the IHBC charity has supported branch capacity and services ever more substantially through appointing dedicated branch consultants. Their roles are very limited for now, as we work our way into this new programme, but their supportive presence will help us all do better. They will be able to channel enhanced National Office support for topic-specific training in areas of CPD that are hard to access, and through our branch CPD partnerships they will be able to support branches manage their finances more efficiently. Clearly as the charter discussions aid a better understanding of what needs to be done, our resources can be targeted more effectively, and by investing in our volunteers’ skills and platforms, we can confidently scale up our services and public benefit. Through informed and managed change, our training, planning and professional CPD infrastructure has also been evolving, suitably informed by valuing what we do already. Our CPD infrastructure, from annual schools to CPD Circulars and our NewsBlog, continues to evolve. Each now reflects a more deliberate alignment with our conservation standards and professional competences. We’ve also enhanced the MATE (Membership Accreditation Training Event) programme, making it more accessible to those seeking accreditation or simply wishing to align their practice with IHBC standards, which remain the same even as the world around us changes. Our annual schools, hosted by branches but now led more by the National Office to ease the volunteer burden, are where learning, practice, standards and outreach come together with volunteering and public benefit. An expanded focus on accessibility, formed by reflection and the need to change, helps us expand public benefit just as we help raise members’ profile with clients, customers and communities. Free pre-School webinar programmes are fast gaining a profile of their own – growing out of small, in-person start-ups in our Wales branch, help make sure we are as inclusive as possible, and tied also to the communities of our members’ clients. Accessibility is critical to members and their colleagues too, as so many have duties to other professions and disciplines. This year’s timely and diverse endorsements of our Schools reflect the success of those changes: IHBC Schools have been branded as ‘pre-eminent’ by outgoing Historic England Chief Executive Duncan Wilson CBE, while the Shrewsbury School is perfectly profiled in the enthusiastic video endorsement – now on our YouTube page, and elsewhere – from no less a figure than Griff Rhys Jones, a Jiminy Cricket for the public benefit of heritage care and conservation! Overall, our efforts on the Memorandum makes clear that all we have been doing for more than a quarter of a century also happens to align with some of the key terms outlined in charter guidance. We may not tick all the boxes needed for a charter, so there’s no guarantees: size, unique-ness, viability, politics and more all may raise definitive barriers not touched on here. But the point is that our development of standards and services shares much with key essentials of a charter. In that context, a charter applicant also must demonstrate tangible achievements in a unique discipline. On that, our draft for the Memorandum has the last word: ‘The IHBC’s primary achievement has been to develop, formalise, implement and disseminate our integrated professional standards and services for regulating an individual’s competence in interdisciplinary historic and built environment conservation practice. Even globally, no professional body equivalent to the IHBC is known to us’. Seán O’Reilly is the Director of IHBC (director@ihbc.org.uk), joining in 2005 after working at the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland. He has written, contributed to and edited numerous publications in architectural history and conservation. IHBC delegates gaining essential training in the regenerated Butter Market in Redruth, Cornwall: this IHBC place-making and design CPD course was led by Dave Chetwyn of Urban Vision, and organised by IHBC South West Branch in conjunction with the central office. (Photo: Jonathan Taylor) IHBC South Branch committee members who, as volunteers, helped organise and co-ordinate the IHBC Annual School in Reading in 2024 (from left to right); Morwenna Breen-Haynes, Claire Turman, Alison Davidson, Sarah Homer and Emily Carter. (Photo: Jonathan Taylor)
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