Let’s make archives for everyone

The Archives for Learning and Education Section of the Archives & Records Association (ARA) UK & Ireland has published an Accessible Learning Toolkit to help archive services to become Send-friendly

The toolkit aims to give archives the tools to help ensure that children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) can engage meaningfully with archives.

The kit has information, ideas, tools and language to help increase accessibility and inclusion of children and young people with SEND in archive services which are Sendfriendly.

A number of archive services and their partner organisations collaborated on the toolkit, providing case studies and sharing their experiences with colleagues in online workshops.

John Chambers, chief executive of the ARA (UK & Ireland) said:

We are very proud to have supported this toolkit. Whilst it is encouraging to see so many positive case studies of archive services becoming more Send-friendly there is always more work to do. As the report says – becoming more Send-friendly is a journey not a destination and you don’t have to do everything at once!

I hope that this toolkit will make it easier for people to start that journey, or take it forward to the next step. I’d like to thank all our sector colleagues for their help in making this toolkit possible and particularly the ALES steering group for their hard work in getting this toolkit published and available to both the archive sector and the wider cultural sector in the UK and Ireland.

The toolkit is available at https://familytr. ee/sendfriendly