ABSTRACT
Archival education sets parameters for professional work, defines the range of the profession, provides a gateway to entry and lays the foundations of career development. Archives conformed to this model from 1947 when structured university programmes began, although before the war it struggled to differentiate its education from that offered to historians and librarians. Many academic disciplines evolve research and theoretical advances alongside teaching, but archives made little intellectual progress in England in the 1950s to 1980s, leaving the profession vulnerable to changes for which it was ill equipped. It concludes custodians of local archives should be trained and it recommended that schools of palaeography should be encouraged at the universities to create the supply of archivists', on the model of the Ecole des Chartes in Paris, who's Director had given evidence to the Committee. It proposes Public Record Office (PRO) staff should be lent to local record offices to disseminate skills.
