Annual report and accounts 2023–24 highlights

We are transforming our historic mission for the digital age, developing new skills and exploiting emerging technology

 
■ Our innovative legislation drafting tool, Lawmaker, is now in use in the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel in the Cabinet Office, the Scottish Parliament and the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office in the Scottish Government. In 2023-24, one of our strategic priorities was to deliver enhancements to Lawmaker to support the drafting of legislation following the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 (the REUL Act) and we also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Northern Ireland Assembly, so that we can start the work to support drafting and amending legislation across another of the four nations.

■ Our Find Case Law service expands year on year. Across 2023-24, we received over 4,900 court judgments and tribunal decisions, publishing 19% of the judgments within an hour of receipt and 86% the same day. As many of these records relate to notable or high-profile cases – such as a ruling on the management of public records arising in unofficial communications channels – an important feature of this service is the capability to produce information that can be published quickly and in accessible formats.

■ We added 51TB to the UK Government Web Archive over 2023-24, from online content produced by government, as well as in partnership with NHS digital teams, the Office for National Statistics, Government Digital Service and cultural heritage organisations.

■ Artificial Intelligence (AI) and we have been leading conversations with colleagues across departments about how AI can be used for managing records and information. In 2023, we hosted our second conference on ‘AI for GKIM’ (government knowledge and information management), organised in collaboration with the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO). To spur on our activity in this area, we have been busy securing funding, including £2m for a project to explore using AI for access to justice with lawtech start-ups, academics and AI specialists.

■ We are now seeing repeated use of our Transfer Digital Records (TDR) service by government departments and we have been developing our user base over the past year, engaging with over 50 transferring bodies. We continue to make improvements to the service, such as adding in new ‘customised’ metadata, plus features for dealing with records that have access conditions, and we are working to accept transfers directly from systems such as SharePoint. As a companion to TDR, we are also developing ‘Access Your Records’, a service for government departments to use once their records have been transferred.

We are bold, active and outward-looking – encountered by people and communities in unexpected places and at vital moments

 
■ It was a busy year at Kew, with 81,500 visitors to our site (9% up on last year), 37,500 visits to our reading rooms and nearly 474,000 documents being produced for public readers. Over 24,000 people joined our online events, too, and our YouTube channel enabled audiences to deep dive into the documents that have shaped the nation alongside our experts. One of our most popular videos took a closer look at MI5 files on a Soviet spy, Klaus Fuchs, who worked as a physicist on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s ‘Manhattan Project’ – the video exploring files from our Security Service collections has been viewed more than 85,000 times.

■ In May 2023, we opened our first family-focused exhibition, Spirit of Invention. Inspired by the thousands of creative designs that were registered with the Board of Trade from 1839 onwards (BT 45), we brought together cutting-edge contemporary technology with eccentric inventions from the Victorian era. We were delighted that these weird and wonderful inventions attracted nearly 10,000 people—42% of whom were coming to The National Archives for the first time. Our latest exhibition opened in February 2024: Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives offers a glimpse into the lives of Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees during World War Two, featuring stories of captives in Germany, Japan and the UK testifying to the many ways that people can harness courage and ingenuity in desperately hard times.

■ We marked several moments of national celebration during 2023-24. The coronation of King Charles III in May 2023 signalled a new era in the nation’s history, and to celebrate the occasion we offered people the chance to explore coronations through history via our website. To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the creation of the NHS, we launched an online portal to spotlight health service records both in our collections and around the archives sector. To mark 75 years since the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush to Britain, we put together a series of events and new resources including blogs, a podcast episode, interactive maps and schools resources.

■ Our education programme saw another lively year of engagement, with over 24,000 school students getting involved in our workshops—up 26% on last year. In person sessions for 2023-24 were more than double the previous year and 30% of schools were joining us for the first time. More than 230 schools signed up for our new online ‘Archives Live’ sessions, meaning that nearly 43,000 students overall explored our records in 2023-24. These sessions are made possible via our new Clore Learning Centre, which features a broadcast studio and two production studios, enabling us to reach students virtually, wherever they are. The first of its kind in a UK archive, our Clore Learning Centre has been generously supported by the Clore Duffield Foundation, thanks to the fundraising efforts of The National Archives Trust.

We lead, enable and inspire pioneering research by fostering community, collaborative engagement, and inclusive practice

 
■ We having been developing a research vision ready for launch in summer 2024 to support our ambition to build the value of our collection and improve access via new technologies, opportunities and understanding. 2023-24 was a successful year for our grant portfolio, with overall income from grants growing to over £1,000,000 – a 60% increase from the previous year.

■ This year, we undertook research projects including conservation work to the Great Cowcher Book of the Duchy of Lancaster, a breathtakingly intricate illuminated survey of English and Welsh landholding and lordship commissioned by King Henry IV in 1399; colour analysis of the Kellett sledge flag from the 1852 Arctic Expedition, in collaboration with the National Museum of the Royal Navy; and adapting ‘sniffer’ methods of detecting explosives and illicit substances for use with low-level insecticides that historically have been used to preserve documents, via a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the Cranfield Institute.

■ Work continues on our Prize Papers project, run with the University of Oldenburg in Germany, funded by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. In 2023, we worked with the Spanish Embassy on the online launch of the Spanish Prize Papers and, in early 2024, we made an exciting discovery in a package: a Faroese sweater from 1807, which was still in pristine condition after 200 years.

■ It was another year of lively discussion and debate at our academic and archives sector events. The annual Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) conference, which we co-organise with Jisc and the British Library, went hybrid for the first time in July 2023, our Annual Digital Lecture in December 2023 explored ‘Memory Making in a Digital Age’ and, in March 2024, our History and Archives in Practice conference went on-the-road for the first time to Cardiff and proved a sell-out success.

■ We made rapid progress on the Our Heritage, Our Stories research project during 2023-24, led by the University of Glasgow with the University of Manchester and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is part of the ‘Towards a National Collection’ programme and will facilitate users to combine community-generated digital content with traditional archival collections. We have been leading on the infrastructure development, using cutting-edge approaches to develop scalable linking and discoverability across digital content held in different locations.

We support archives of all kinds to sustain and develop their services

 
■ We recently marked ten years as the government’s policy lead for archives in England. Reflecting upon our leadership role, current challenges and developments, we published a leadership statement in July last year reaffirming our commitment to the archives sector. We have identified three areas for development as we move into our second decade as sector lead: advocacy, partnership working and embedding sector leadership within our organisation. We have also renewed our relationship with sector partners, signing a new collaboration agreement with the Archives & Records Association (ARA), as well as renewing our Memorandum of Understanding with Arts Council England.

■ One of the biggest success stories of our year was the launch of the Level 7 Archivist and Records Manager apprenticeship in October 2023. As the first technical training route to becoming a qualified archivist, the scheme is a major step towards making our profession a welcoming place for anyone, whatever their background, and more representative of the communities we serve. Apprentices spend 80% of the time in on-the-job training at an archive and 20% in formal training with an external provider. The scheme has been several years in the making and is the result a major collaboration with colleagues across the sector, the Archives and Records Association, assessment organisation CILIP Pathways and training provider Westminster Adult Education Service.

■ In June 2023, we launched our new grant funding offer for the archives sector. We now offer seven grant programmes – covering risk and resilience, access to the record and skills, innovation and engagement – and have reviewed and refreshed our monitoring and evaluation framework. In 2023-24, we allocated 58 grants to the archives sector worth a total of over £650,000, including £430,000 through Archives Revealed, our flagship cataloguing and scoping programme, delivered in partnership with the Wolfson Foundation and the Pilgrim Trust.

■ In June 2023, we launched our refreshed strategy for digital capacity building, Our Digital Century, which will run until 2026. As we implement this strategy with colleagues in the archives sector, we have been developing our training materials, adding new modules to the ‘Novice to Know-How’ programme we run with partners in the Digital Preservation Coalition.