The SKR Archive: Early Beginnings
Where our journey with the Sir Ken Robinson Archive began
It’s a cold, grey day here in London, but I’m spending it writing about Dad and there’s a strange kind of poetry in the stillness of outside and the calm within at sitting down to put words on a blank page (well, screen).
One of our flagship initiatives at the SKR Foundation is his Archive, and having taken some time to reflect on where to begin sharing it with you, I think the best place is probably the start - or at least, where I came into it.
A word in advance though: it’s impossible to share this journey with you without also sharing some of the grief that exists alongside it. It won’t be the focus, the collection is the star of this show, but the very fact we’re doing this is so intimately connected with the fact that Dad isn’t here to do it himself. So once in a while it will inevitably rear its head.
So with that said and out of the way, let’s go back to the first time I ever heard there was an archive to be sorted in the first place: August 2020.
No doubt that summer is burned in your brain too, as having been the first summer of the Covid-19 pandemic. The world was locked down, and while we were existing in a shared context, we weren’t all necessarily having a shared experience. I remember at the time reading “we are all in the same storm, but we are not all in the same boat,” which felt like it hit the nail on the head.
For us, the pandemic had quickly taken a back seat to Dad’s cancer diagnosis. It had its implications - that no one could visit him in hospital, for example - but for the most part the pandemic became background noise to our own private nightmare.
My parents had moved from LA to London in March 2020, just days before the first lockdown was announced. As luck would have it, they had rented an apartment next to mine and Anthony’s, so we were able to form a bubble the second they became an option.
Photo: Dad and Anthony (and our daughter, Adeline) at my parent’s apartment working on the Learning From Home podcast we launched in the pandemic before Dad got sick.
I mention this so you know that what happened all played out in unfamiliar surroundings, and in the chaos of a significant transition. We weren’t in the family home they had lived in for 20 years in LA. Instead, we were in a (beautiful) new apartment in West London overlooking the river and the Hammersmith Bridge. In so many ways it was a stroke of luck how things played out, but it also added a level of the surreal to the already out of body experience of it all: the flat was new, sparsely furnished, and painted (not by my parents) completely grey.
To add to it, we moved away from that part of London after Dad died, and so it was almost like the apartment was the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter - a place that showed up just to play host to this very strange and very intense period of our lives. Somewhere we will never go back to.
The other thing to know (and then I will get to the Archive, I promise!) is that it all happened very quickly. They moved in March, he was diagnosed in April, operated on in May, told he’d be fine in June, went for a scan in July, and died in August. Even more quick was the time between his prognosis changing (August 3rd) and the day he died (August 21). 18 days.
The impact of all of this was that any direction we had on what to do after he had died was given in bite sized moments.
Like the day he called me into his room and said:
“I have some boxes in storage. When you’ve figured out where you’re going to be, maybe you could house a little Archive there?”
I said I would, and he suggested we might hang the 5 foot sledgehammer he’d been awarded by Big Picture Learning for his “groundbreaking work in education” over the entrance. I explained I thought that might be a health and safety issue. He laughed and conceded maybe it could be propped up next to the door instead. And then someone walked in and the conversation changed, as they do.
He never mentioned it again, but it rang in my ears after he died. It took two years before we were able to head to the storage unit and see what he meant. “Some boxes,” it transpired, was in fact about 120 boxes, filled with treasures that span from his early years in Liverpool (and give a first hand account of the 1950s polio epidemic) all the way through to the weeks before he died. 70 years of artefacts, diary entries, trinkets, book drafts, meeting minutes, project files, video footage and talk notes. LOTS of talk notes. In short, a comprehensive catalogue of a life well lived.
The years since have been a crash course in the world of archiving. Anthony and I have spoken to Archivists from universities, foundations, and national organisations in the UK, US, and UAE. What we have learned is that establishing an Archive is a series of catch-22 hurdles: we needed funding to sort through the boxes and find out what was inside them, but in order to apply for funding we needed to already know what was inside them; in order to catalog the boxes we needed to protect them with insurance, but we couldn’t get insurance without a full catalog list.
We’ve been advised that we have one shot at playing the old VHS recordings because the technology is so outdated that if it’s mishandled we could lose the content forever. That costs money, but it’s hard to convince a potential funder to take a gamble on what’s on the tape before it’s been played: it could be a world class, never before seen recording of an early, pivotal talk, BUT there is always an outside chance that it’s actually a mis-labeled home taping of the Land Before Time from Christmas Day circa 1994. You see the issue?
It became clear that we needed a scoping survey of the boxes, and quickly. The National Archives (UK) explains that a Scoping Survey is done by an independent archivist to “produce an expert collections report (or scoping report) on a full or partial archival collection, for which the contents are unknown in detail, but which is significant and of interest to the public.” So in May 2022, independent Archivist Janice Tullock came to visit us for four days to do just that.
Below are some of the insights from the final Scoping Survey:
“Analysis of Significance
The assessment of the archive collection showed:
42% of the archive collection surveyed was assessed at grade A, “Of international or national significance - making a fundamental and long term contribution to intellectual thought or the study of a discipline, and integral to the collections”.
19% of the archive collections surveyed was assessed as having “Of clear organisational significance, to Sir Ken Robinson and the understanding of creativity in education ”.
6% of the archive collection surveyed was assessed as having “Of clear significance to the creative or education community as a whole through its cultural or historical association OR providing contextual organisational significance to the study of creative education”
Analysis of the potential for research and learning
As part of the collections survey I assessed the collections against the survey criteria in Appendix 1 for research and learning. This was a top level survey and didn’t examine every item in detail. The results were as follows:
43% of the Archive collections surveyed was assessed at grade A for research and learning: “Has potential to be a star object in the collection, used for display, research, teaching, public access activities.”
These are very good results for an archive collection of this type. The most important parts of this collection for research and learning are the audio-visual items, the note cards for speeches and the notes and drafts for publications.”
We found these results to be incredibly encouraging, but in many ways it just confirmed what we already knew: that the treasures within the boxes were as special and significant as the man who tucked them away. In short, they will be as close to accessing the inner workings of Dad’s mind as we will ever come close to.
Following the scoping survey we were incredibly grateful to receive funding from the Herb Alpert Foundation to spend 12 months sorting the collection with the Archivist. Our next phase is to digitise Archive and use it as a force for good within the movement to transform human potential that Dad helped to inspire.
Our long-term goal is to be able to share the Archive with as wide an audience as possible and to make it accessible for all.
Thank you for reading,
Kate
If you would like to support the work of the Foundation in establishing, protecting, and sharing the Archive, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.
Not only will your subscription support the Archive directly, you will also get weekly updates on our progress and never before seen insight into the artefacts within as well as personal reflections on the process (like this one).
We feel it would be both a tragedy and a huge disservice to put this archive in storage and let it get dusty, so we’re committed to establishing it fully and, one day, being able to share it with the world in a way that is as open source as possible.
We can only do that with support from people like you. The Sir Ken Robinson Foundation is a passion project, not a money making machine - all of the subscriptions go directly to project overheads, like keeping the archive boxes kept in a safe environment, and paying our lovely Archivist, Louise.
All that said, we know it isn’t possible for everyone to pay a subscription cost, and we’re so glad you’re here in any capacity - it’s the people who keep Dad’s legacy alive. We would be so grateful if you could show your support for free by hitting the heart button below and sharing our posts with your own communities if you feel moved to.