Timetable
Eligibility
Finance and Budgeting
Assessment Process
Timetable
Applications for Scoping Grants will be open four times a year, usually at three-month intervals. Dates for all future rounds are listed on below:
| Round | Opens | Closes | Panel Meeting |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 6th May 2025 | 12th June 2025 | July 2025 |
| 4 | 1st September 2025 | 2nd October 2025 | November 2025 |
| 5 | 19th January 2026 | 19th February 2026 | March 2026 |
| 6 | 18th May 2026 | 18th June 2026 | July 2026 |
| 7 | 7th September 2026 | 15th October 2026 | November 2026 |
| 8 | 18th January 2027 | 18th February 2027 | March 2027 |
Eligibility
This programme can fund most organisations with an archival collection including deposited collections, which are able to provide access to the collection for the public in the UK for at least ten years following the grant’s completion.
Archives are rich sources of information and Archives Revealed does not make a distinction between physical or digital (or mixed) collections. An archive collection is one that holds unique records, which can be of local, national and international importance and are often themed by place or thematic area of interest. To find out more about what an archive collection is, please visit: What are archives? – The National Archives.
For the purposes of Archives Revealed, we use the definition of an archive collection as used within the Archive Service Accreditation Scheme:
“Materials created or received by a person, family or organisation, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in them or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator, especially those materials maintained using the principles of provenance, original order and collective control; permanent records.”
It is not mandatory to be an accredited archive, to apply for a Scoping Grant.
While usually thought of as handwritten or typed documents on paper, archives also commonly include: printed documents, photographs, digital objects (such as e-mail, databases etc), audio/visual material, sketches, drawings, maps and plans. This list is not exhaustive and may include more unusual items, such as the knotted cords used for record keeping by Andean cultures or a variety of types of object.
Archives Revealed can fund any eligible organisation in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. The funded collection must also be held in these nations. We cannot fund organisations based in the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man, or organisations whose collections are held outside of the UK.
If your project will take place in Wales, you must include the Welsh language in all aspects of your work. You must tell us in your application how you will promote and support the Welsh language and reflect the bilingual nature of Wales.
Funded organisations must make their collections accessible to people outside of their organisation for at least ten years, following the conclusion of the grant-funded project. We can fund organisations with owned or deposited collections, provided that they can provide a commitment from the depositor that the collection will not be withdrawn from public access or sold within ten years of the project end date. We will reclaim funding where this condition is not met.
There are no restrictions on past applicants applying, however our data shows that reapplications are no more likely to receive funding than first-time applications. There is no restriction on institutions submitting an application for a different collection than that previously assessed.
Should you have any questions about the eligibility of your collection for an Archives Revealed Scoping Grant, please contact the team by email using: archivegrants@nationalarchives.gov.uk.
Finance and Budgeting
Archives Revealed Scoping Grants provide funding for a consultant to produce a report.
The grant funding is solely for the purpose of producing the report. Each award value is £3,000, compensating both time (up to £2,400 for six days’ work at £400 per day) and reasonable expenses (up to £600) incurred by the consultant in delivering the report. Funds that are unspent at the end of a Scoping Grant will need to be returned to the Archives Revealed programme.
The sums above are inclusive of any VAT charged by consultants.
If for any reason expenses are anticipated to be higher than £600 per project, for example when an archive service is located in a remote area, then please contact the Archives Revealed team in advance of submitting your application via email at: archivegrants@nationalarchives.gov.uk.
Please note that grant funds will be paid to the applicant organisation, not to the consultant directly (this is different from Scoping Grants awarded before September 2024). Grantees should be prepared to contract consultants themselves, and any procurement should follow The National Lottery Heritage Fund’s procurement good practice guidance.
The Archives Revealed team will be available to support grantees in selecting and working with consultants. The Archives Revealed team maintains a list of independent expert consultants, and when an applicant is awarded a Scoping Grant, they will be given the opportunity to have their project offered to consultants on this list, and to be connected to interested consultants who will advise of their availability and how the project matches their skills, specialisms and geographic proximity. Grantees will be provided with guidance sheets on selecting and contracting a consultant, and on preparing your collection for assessment, when being awarded a grant.
The rates paid to consultants are in accord with those set by the Archives and Records Association Salary Recommendations Pay Review Group and its guidance for freelancer rates.
Please note that applicants cannot apply separately to Archives Revealed and directly to The National Lottery Heritage Fund for the same project, or use funding from Archives Revealed to match-fund a National Lottery Heritage Fund application.
Assessment Process
Applicants are required to submit their applications via the online system above, apart from in extenuating circumstances. Please contact the Archives Revealed team should you wish to submit an application in MS Word, or if you have other accessibility requirements with which we may be able to assist, at least 15 days before the closing of a round of funding. Contact the team at archivegrants@nationalarchives.gov.uk.
Applications will be assessed against the following three criteria – please review the guidance below to find out more about what we are looking for in your answers:
- Significance
- Need
- Audiences, Engagement and Impact
The application criteria in Archives Revealed are deliberately kept broad to enable archive services to communicate their own key priorities.
Applications are assessed by a panel of archival and heritage experts, from across The National Archives. Each application will be scored numerically against the criteria above, according to the following scale:
| Score | Rating |
| 1 | Poor |
| 2 | Low |
| 3 | Good |
| 4 | Excellent |
| 5 | Outstanding |
Applications are assessed by a panel of archival and heritage experts, from across The National Archives. The current panel is:
Assessment Criteria
Further information on each assessment criterion is given below. This information is not intended to be exhaustive: an outstanding answer may not cover all of the points mentioned, and/or may cover other points as appropriate to the applicant and their project. However, the information below should assist applicants in writing successful proposals and will be provided to each panellist to guide their assessment.
- Significance
Archives Revealed is committed to supporting the preservation and use of significant archival collections within the United Kingdom. You should aim to outline why your collection is important, unique and of clear value to your audiences, today and in the future.
Significance may be different for different audiences that engage with a collection, and it may be helpful to consider who they are. An academic may have a different goal, when engaging with a collection, than a family historian or community representative.
The prompts below may help you to think about why and how your collection is significant, but you do not need to cover all of them – you should focus your answer on your collection’s areas of strength:
- Provenance: who created, collected and has used the collection.
- Rarity: whether the collection is unique or unusual, and if it is a particularly fine example of a collection of its type.
- Condition and Completeness: whether the collection is intact and in good condition, and if its condition can tell us anything about its history, ownership or use.
- Historical, Cultural or Scientific Meaning: how the collection tells the story of particular people, groups, organisations, events, places, beliefs, or practices; whether it has special historic or cultural interest for an audience, region or community; whether and how it could be used for academic research; and whether it enriches or fills in gaps in other collections, at your organisation or elsewhere.
- Sensory and Emotional Impact: whether the collection has strong visual/sensory impact, or evokes a strong personal or cultural response; and whether the language, format, technique, design or style reflect outstanding creativity or innovation.
- Marketing and Entrepreneurialism: whether the collection could support marketing, income generation or profile-raising for your organisation or community.
- Engagement, Access and Inclusion: whether cataloguing the collection would enable the archive service to reach a specific audience group, or to engage with a new or wider audience.
Please ensure that the focus of your response is on the collection that you are intending to work with. The significance of the wider collections in your archive can be important, but your main focus should be on the collection that you are applying for.
If you want to find out more about significance statements, there is detailed guidance in this video: Archives Revealed: How to conduct a significance assessment and write a significance statement – YouTube.
- Need
Tell us why your project is needed, and why it is needed now.
Please use this section to detail why you are applying for a Scoping Grant and what you believe the benefits of having a Scoping Grant and improving the understanding of your collection may be.
Here you will want to consider the circumstances that have led to your applying for funding: does the project align with your organisation’s strategic vision or goals, are there important dates such as anniversaries coming up, or has there been a change in circumstances that means that now is the right time for you and your organisation to consider the management and future of your archive collection?
We would also like to you to consider the potential results of having a scoping report conducted. What changes will receiving a grant inspire? Will you change the way you manage the collection? Are there challenges in the collections management historically that a scoping report could impact? For example, has it been cared for in appropriate ways before?
We would also like you to consider changes beyond the collection itself: what changes will a scoping report have on those who engage with the collection, whether it be the staff who manage the collections, volunteers who assist with the collection, or the wider organisation?
Scoping reports can an advocacy tool: they will detail recommended actions and next steps in your collection’s management. Do you hope to use the report for advocacy purposes, whether internal advocacy within your organisation, or external advocacy in, for example, applying for follow-on funding for the collection?
It is important to outline why a Scoping Grant provides a solution, or partial solution to challenges you are experiencing now and in the longer term. Each archive-holding organisation and collection will have different needs, and this is the opportunity to explain your own circumstances to the panel.
- Audiences, engagement, and impact
We define impact as “the demonstrable contribution that a project makes.” Tell us why your project is going to change things: for you, for your archive service, for your users and audiences, for the archives sector, or for society. We want to understand what difference your proposal will make, and what change will result from the project, and for whom.
Ask yourself ‘what will happen?’ What are the short-term, medium-term and long-term changes that the project will bring about, and who will be affected? Is the change physical (new resources, materials or capital), procedural, or cultural?
It is also important to consider the impact that your project will have on users of your archive. The users of archives can be diverse, with audiences having different motivations and needs from your service. You are best placed to understand who your audiences are, and who they could be: it might be helpful to explain the change you want to bring about, in how existing users interact with your service and collections, and/or in how you reach new audiences.
You should consider who the audience is for the collection; whether people who do not currently engage with archive services might be interested in the collection; and how you might ultimately reach these people.
You will want to outline how you intend to engage with audiences outside of your institution: do you have plans or partnerships in place, to engage with (for example) your local community, researchers, schools or higher education?
It is important to consider how the grant will have an impact beyond its own duration, and create a sustainable legacy of change: is this project part of a longer-term strategic plan, and how does it align with other activities or the future direction of the organisation?
Impact can take many different forms, and every project will have a different response: but a strong answer will always clearly outline what outcomes it is seeking to create, and how it plans to engage with beneficiaries and audiences, inside and outside of the archive service which is applying.
We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes providing support, in the form of reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us. You must contact us as early as possible in the application process. We recommend contacting us at least 15 working days before the competition closing date, to ensure that we can provide you with the most suitable support possible. You can contact us by emailing archivegrants@nationalarchives.gov.uk.