DSA 2026 Ian Wakeling - Distinguished Service in Archives and Records Management

5 Aug

Distinguished Service in Archives and Records Management

Nomination Information:

Ian Wakeling is a distinguished member of our professional community who is a well-respected for his important contributions to raising the proﬁle of archives and records management in the voluntary sector. His route into the archive profession began with a period running his own archive research and publishing company, Archive Enterprises. He followed this with voluntary and paid work under the guidance of Derek Shorrocks at Somerset Record Oﬃce.

Ian completed his Diploma in Archives Administration at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1988, passing with distinction. His ﬁrst professional appointment was at the BBC Records Centre where he appraised records for transfer to the BBC Written Archives Centre. In 1989 Ian was appointed Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) Archivist, shortly before its abolition. His work at ILEA comprised of two strands. Firstly, he set up a records centre and managed records transfers to the interim London Residuary Body. Secondly, he appraised and catalogued the records of the ILEA held at County Hall in preparation for their transfer to the Greater London Record Oﬃce (now The London Archives).

Ian is perhaps best known for work in charities and the voluntary sector. In 1991, Ian was appointed by The Children’s Society, formally The Church of England Children’s Society and a national children and youth charity, as the Archivist and Records Manager. He was the second Archivist for The Children’s Society and was their ﬁrst professionally trained Archivist to be appointed. When Ian arrived at The Children’s Society, the Archive was an under-utilised resource for staﬀ, and a marginal adjunct to the library department in the Marketing and Communications Division. In 1998, he took on additional responsibilities for data protection, and his role was retitled by The Children’s Society to the Records, Archives and Data Protection Manager. Through his expert leadership and experience, Ian developed The Children’s Society’s archives, records management, and data protection functions into the sector leading service it is today. He has overseen major transformations to the Records and Archives Centre’s holdings and functions. He personally spearheaded the development of the archive collection to encompass all aspects of The Children’s Society’s activities since its foundation in 1881. In addition, he established a professional records management service and was responsible for many aspects of The Children’s Society’s corporate information governance and, notably, Data Protection compliance. Now situated in the legal and compliance department of the Chief Executive’s Oﬃce, and line managed by The Children’s Society’s lawyer and company secretary, Ian’s tireless dedication and advocacy has transformed the archive, records management, and data protection functions to an essential resource for operational governance and accountability. In April 2026, Ian retired from The Children’s Society, one month oﬀ 35 years of service.

As chair of the Charity Archivist and Records Managers Group (CHARM), and with the support of other members of CHARM, I believe that Ian should be considered for nomination for a Distinguished Service Award in Archives and Records Management by the ARA for the following reasons:

His leadership and work in developing The Children’s Society’s Archive into a well-respected archive service.

Three further speciﬁc elements of his work are detailed below.

His mentorship of a generation of archivists and paraprofessionals who worked with him at The Children’s Society Records and Archives Centre.
His contribution to the wider profession, including being a co-founder of the Charity Archivists and Records Managers Group (CHARM)

1: The Children’s Society

Although The Children’s Society resources supported the day-to-day functions of the Record and Archives Centre, Ian helped fundraise for additional support from a variety of funders to undertake a range of development projects. He had several initial successes with small scale projects which led to more ambitious applications. He successfully applied for a sequence of major grants from National Lottery’s New Opportunities Fund (Hidden Lives Revealed), the National Cataloguing Grants Programme (Including the Excluded) and the Wellcome Trust (Unexplored Riches in Medical History). His fundraising activities enabled both internal development and the creation of externally facing resources. As a result of these grants, Ian and his team, have made considerable improvements to the condition of and access to the archive collection. These include:

Cataloguing a large proportion of the archive and making the catalogue available.
Conserving 9,000 of the earliest children’s case ﬁles to a usable stated
Developing and launching the Hidden Lives Revealed website as a resource that opened

The Children’s Society’s archives to wider audiences including care experienced people and their descendants, school children, and researchers such as academics and local historians.

Ian was later able to obtain internal funding to digitise the microﬁlms (made in the 1970s with the original ﬁles destroyed) of later children’s case ﬁles which were rapidly deteriorating, ensuring a key record series survives in a stable and accessible state. The children’s case ﬁles are inscribed in the UNESCO UK Memory of the World register.

Being a charity focussed on children and young people, The Children’s Society was a good ﬁt for the Young Cultural Creators project. As part of this project that ran over several years, six groups of young people from South London schools visited the The Children’s Society Records and Archives Centre. The project sought to introduce the young people to archives and support their creative practice by providing inspiring source material. Ian worked closely with Julia Green, a children’s author, and he had the pleasure of seeing some young people produce outstanding creative work based on the archive they otherwise would not have had the opportunity; one teacher commented about one young person ‘that’s the most work they’ve done all year’. On a visit to the school the following year, the young person came up to Ian and Julia to tell them, ‘I’m still writing poetry’. This is probably Ian’s single most satisfying stand-alone moment in sharing the value of archives and the joy they can bring, as he referenced it at his retirement event.

2: Mentorship

While some of Ian’s achievements can be considered as his alone, many were accomplished with the support and dedicated work of talented and motivated colleagues. Over the years, Ian has lined managed over 30 staﬀ at The Children’s Society; many of his previous colleagues regard their time at The Children’s Society as a formative or signiﬁcant period in their career and represents a testament to Ian’s support and mentorship of new professionals. He remains in active contact with over half his colleagues who were employed on permanent or longer-term temporary contracts.

Ian is a much beloved and respected member of The Children’s Society staﬀ. The main reasons are twofold. Firstly, is Ian’s management style. He has always worked hard to foster a supportive environment for his colleagues. His leadership has enabled his colleagues to professionally ﬂourish by taking ownership of their work, ensuring they have appropriate development activities, and, importantly, always crediting their contributions and achievements. Secondly, is Ian’s unwavering commitment to supporting the professional development of his colleagues.

During his time at The Children’s Society, Ian supported the ﬁrst Library and Archive Assistant he worked with to apply for university. He also encouraged another colleague to apply for an archival PhD opportunity in his ﬁnal month at work. He gave a sequence of paraprofessionals the work experience needed to enable them to succeed in obtaining places on archive and records management training courses (or other training if their interests took them elsewhere). Ian also appointed a number of early career qualiﬁed archivists, who gained the experience to take them on to more independent or more senior roles.

Finally, he also appointed an archivist who he knew would need considerable leeway due to childcare responsibilities, enabling them to continue working when this had not been possible elsewhere.

3: Contribution to the profession

Ian has made numerous important contributions to the archives, records management, and information governance professions. He ﬁrst joined the Society of Archivists as an early professional, and he is a registered member of the ARA. However, Ian’s main contributions to the profession has been through his work with the special interest groups of CHARM and the Religious Archives Group (RAG). In addition, he has also contributed to the International Council on Archives (ICA) activities for 15 years.

Ian was one of the founding members of CHARM. He, alongside two colleagues at Oxfam and the NSPCC, were prompted to form CHARM at the Records Management Society’s conference in 1996, following the Charity Commission’s criticism of record-keeping in the voluntary sector in England and Wales. Over the next few weeks, Ian and his colleagues canvassed their professional network to establish CHARM. They arranged CHARM’s inaugural meeting in August 1996, and seven colleagues were in attendance. Over the 30 years since, CHARM has grown in numbers, found its place in the archive and records management ecosystem, been involved in a range of initiatives and has carried out a primary purpose of being a network for archivists and records managers who often work alone or in small teams. Ian has been an active member throughout this time and is now the longest standing member of CHARM.

In addition to CHARM, Ian was a member of the Religious Archives Group’s committee, and a member of the Child Care History Network. He was a committee member of the ICA’s Section forReligious Archives (ICA-SKR) through the period when it evolved into the Section for the Archives of Faith Traditions (ICA-SAFT). Ian’s expertise has been recognised by the archival profession internationally when he chaired a panel on child migrants at the ICA Congress in Brisbane in 2012. Beyond the archival world, Ian represented the voluntary sector on the British Standard’s Institution’s committee drafting the data protection standard: BS 10012: Data Protection – Speciﬁcation for a personal information management system, which was published in 2009.

Ian’s contributions to CHARM have been reﬂected in my own research, and CHARM’s wider impact has informed the basis of The National Archives’ Charity Archives Development plan.