What Does the Volunteer Cohort of the Heritage Sector Look like in 2025?

What is this advice about?

Volunteers are a vital part of the heritage sector. From gardening, welcoming visitors to historic places and excavating archaeological sites to archiving oral histories and leading governance on boards, they carry out essential duties. At Historic England, one of our key priorities is making sure as many people as possible can enjoy and engage with heritage, including through volunteering opportunities.

This advice is for any organisation in the heritage sector that has volunteers. It outlines details of the 2025 Historic England Heritage Sector Volunteer Diversity Survey, with key dates and information on how to get involved.

What are the key points?

Why volunteering is important to the heritage sector and individuals

Volunteering in heritage and its benefits on individual physical and mental health, mental wellbeing, and connection to community and place is the subject of much research.

For instance, Historic England's wellbeing team have undertaken and commissioned research into this topic, finding that heritage volunteering offers unique opportunities due to roles having purpose, value, and opportunities to connect to special places in a "virtuous circle".

The wellbeing impacts of volunteering would have amplified benefits for people who are marginalised as well as those facing other factors that may form barriers such as caring responsibilities and living in areas that score highly on the national indices of multiple deprivation. However, as government figures into volunteering demonstrate, people who could benefit the most from volunteering opportunities are least likely to take part – limited by their other responsibilities, by perceived or actual lack of accessibility, by financial limitations, and by perceptions of it 'not being for them'.

We also know that volunteering is a key way for people to gain experience and connections on heritage sector career paths – so volunteering currently forms an important component of the sector in terms of work experience and career progression.

A recent report by Heritage Pulse highlighted that the heritage sector is heavily reliant on volunteers and that there are many 1000s of people volunteering across different types of organisations doing many kinds of roles. Recruitment can often be challenging for organisations, which is a risk factor for them in terms of sustainability and resilience.

Volunteers are an enormous asset to the heritage sector: a resource built on passion, experience, expertise, knowledge, and capacity to make sure heritage can be preserved, interpreted, and enjoyed.

What is this pilot Volunteer Diversity Survey looking to find out?

In 2024, Historic England undertook a pilot project to survey the diversity of the workforce in the heritage sector to understand the barriers to jobs and careers and where there were gaps in representation. To complete this pilot, Historic England is now running a similar pilot survey of the volunteer cohort in the sector.

As a pilot, the Heritage Sector Volunteer Diversity Survey has 2 main aims:

• To establish a strong methodology for surveying volunteers across the heritage sector
• To gather diversity data on volunteers from organisations of all types and sizes, to establish levels of representation and understand where there are barriers to participation

How can I get involved?

Volunteer managers, coordinators, and others with responsibility for volunteers

To help us understand how we can best support the sector, we need to understand what the volunteer cohort looks like – helping us to understand any barriers we can tackle. To ensure we reach as many volunteers as possible for this work, we are looking to anyone who has responsibility for volunteers (managers, coordinators, senior volunteers, or any other relevant role) to help us reach their volunteers. 

We have developed free online training sessions to help build awareness of the survey and its questions, as well as holding conversations about diversity with volunteers. These sessions will take place in March and April 2025, with dates and booking details below.

Volunteers

Anyone who volunteers in the heritage sector can take part in the online survey. Your responses will be anonymous, with no identifiable personal information or details about your organisation collected.

The survey will be open between May and July 2025. Regular reminders will be circulated via social media, heritage sector news sources, and key organisations.

The results will be reported in autumn 2025.

Key dates

March and April 2025

Training sessions for anyone with responsibility for volunteers are taking place on:

• 24 March, 1 to 2pm
• 26 March, 6 to 7pm
• 31 March, 1 to 2pm
• 2 April, 6 to 7pm

Sign up to a session

The presentation will be recorded and uploaded to this page for viewing by anyone who cannot make the sessions or wants to remind themselves of the content.

May to July 2025

The survey will launch in May 2025.

Links to the survey will be shared widely via heritage organisations, heritage-specific news sources, social media, and volunteer organisations.

Autumn 2025

The initial report of the findings of the survey will be launched and shared.

For more information on this project, please get in touch with the Historic England Inclusive Heritage Team.