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The Education Service aims to help teachers of all subjects and of all age ranges to use the historic environment as an enjoyable and creative learning resource. Five Education Officers support the whole spectrum of EH's work, giving advice and practical help on working on our historic properties and in using the wider historic environment to look at conservation issues and archaeology.
During the year we have collaborated with local archaeological units to provide teachers and children with the opportunity to work on three archaeological sites at Yarnton, in Oxfordshire, at Boxgrove in Sussex, and at Gosbecks in Essex. Work with school children has been taking place at Boxgrove and Gosbecks for two years; at Boxgrove, with its dramatic finds from the Paleolithic, for a period of six weeks during the summer months, and at the Romano-British site of Gosbecks, again over the summer months, but with a teacher attached to Colchester Museum in post for the whole of the two years. At Yarnton, where the archaeological excavations have been prompted by gravel extraction, there is a long history of human occupation from 4000 BC to the present time. An education officer was appointed to work with school children over a three-week period in September. At all the sites children have observed and talked to archaeologists at work, and at some have had the chance to put archaeological techniques into practice on already excavated areas. They have learnt how to dry sieve, how to clean and identify finds, and the importance of careful record-keeping. At Boxgrove, a flint knapper was on hand to show how early tools were made. All the teachers were involved in on-site training, and follow-up visits to school were made by the education officers if requested. In all cases written material was provided to help teachers understand the work, and to give them ideas for applying the project across all areas of the curriculum. The Trust for Wessex Archaeology and the Education Service have been working together with two local schools at Old Sarum in Wiltshire on a project to provide teaching materials on settlement and landscape. Different aspects of the site and its development were studied in depth with the project co-ordinator, and the children were also given an idea of the labour involved in what is now a distant, mechanised task, that of producing yarn, by being shown how to spin using a drop spindle.
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New publications this year include Teaching Archaeology: A United Kingdom Directory of Resources produced in collaboration with the CBA. It lists archaeological organisations and people, and the services they provide for schools, with information on museums and sites that schools can visit and details of relevant books, videos and computer software. There are sections on courses, careers advice, and re-enactment groups. There are two new titles in the Education on Site series: Ancient Technology, by Jake Keen, a teacher's guide to answering the questions most children ask, like how people long ago built their homes, kept warm, and fed themselves, or how they made tools from flint or bone, or got metal out of rock. and World Heritage Sites by Genevieve Wheatley. This discusses how such sites are identified, why we preserve them, and looks problems such as mass international tourism and destruction by increased pollution. A large and colourful poster of UK World Heritage Sites is included with the book. In addition, we have been working with UNESCO's Associated Schools Project and World Heritage Centre in developing an international teaching kit focussing on UNESCO's World Heritage Convention. The kit, which is to be launched at the end of 1997, in six languages looks at how to use heritage sites across the curriculum.