Contents
1. Overview
These guidelines are for organisations seeking funding to deliver skills and training support for the screen heritage sector workforce.
The BFI National Lottery Screen Heritage Fund – Organisational Skills programme is looking to support ambitious projects that help ensure that the screen heritage sector has the workforce it needs to deliver public benefit and engage people across the UK with screen culture. We are looking for projects that develop screen heritage skills that the commercial market cannot support but are essential if the public is to draw the greatest possible benefit from screen culture.
Screen heritage requires a combination of cutting-edge digital skills and highly-specialist expertise in working with analogue formats.
In this current strategy period, BFI would like to offer support for skills development for:
- organisational screen heritage training provision, knowledge sharing and knowledge exchange activities; and
- activities designed to improve screen heritage workforce retention and create inclusive, flexible and supportive workplaces, in line with the Fund objectives
We want to support the screen heritage sector in developing skills needed for the future, including in digital, environmental sustainability, diversity, equity and inclusion by offering funding to deliver discrete time-limited initiatives with defined benefits and outputs for the [screen heritage] workforce.
These could include:
- Offering opportunities for professional development, and entry level training in screen heritage
- Offering opportunities for staff to undertake training (possibly equivalent to trainee placements, interning or apprenticeships) at other screen heritage organisations to gain new skills and improve existing ones
- Offering paid sabbatical opportunities for staff to undertake work in other screen heritage organisations to gain new skills and improve existing ones
- Knowledge sharing and collaboration across archives and cultural partners facilitating skills development
- Activity ensuring that the heritage workforce better represents the diversity of communities across the UK
- Engaging with national and international training and professional development opportunities, attending conferences, networking meetings and other events, in-person and online, in the UK and abroad, to learn and share skills, expertise and experience – this could be an organisation completing an umbrella application for multiple staff members to attend a training event; covering membership fees for multiple staff to join sector associations which offer screen heritage training (e.g. FIAF) or partner with an international training provider to deliver professional development activities in the UK. Staff members seeking support for individual training or professional development activity should apply through our bursary scheme – please see the guidelines for our Individual Skills funding
These are examples, and we will consider a wide range of types of projects, providing they meet the objectives and assessment criteria.
Separately, we will support individuals to engage with training and professional development opportunities to learn, share skills, expertise and experience. Please see the guidelines for Individual Skills funding.
BFI Screen Heritage Organisational Skills funding is open to applications from organisations that are a non-profit regional or national film archive or collection network in the UK, whose remit is to collect, preserve or make moving image collections accessible.
2. Delivering against our National Lottery Strategy
We aim to enable a thriving screen heritage sector and unlock the UK’s screen heritage for education and enjoyment to ensure everyone can experience a great range of screen culture. All Skills activity supported by the BFI National Lottery Screen Heritage Fund must deliver against objective 3 (below) and at least one of the following outcomes of the BFI’s National Lottery strategy:
Objective 1:
Experiencing screen culture – everyone can experience a great range of screen culture
Objective 1 outcomes:
- People across the UK can access a wider choice of film and the moving image including stories that reflect their lives
- Funding helps to tackle social, economic, and geographic barriers for screen audiences in new and effective ways
- More people can engage with heritage collections that better reflect the diversity of the UK
Objective 3: (Mandatory for Skills awards)
A skilled and representative workforce – The UK screen sector workforce is skilled and reflects the population
Objective 3 outcomes:
- Workforce retention is improved by building inclusive, flexible and supportive workplaces
- Vital skills for the sector that cannot be delivered by the commercial market are developed
Objective 4:
Success in a changing landscape – Independents and cultural organisations can adapt and thrive in a changing landscape
Objective 4 outcomes:
- Better support available for small and medium-sized enterprises and independents to develop their businesses
- Screen organisations have significantly reduced their carbon footprint
Key Performance Indicators
The BFI will measure the success of the BFI National Lottery Screen Heritage Fund’s four programmes (Resilience, Project, Organisational Skills and Individual Skills funding) using the following Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
UK-wide
- Number of in-person engagements with funded activity (e.g. screenings, community or outreach). Target for Fund: 300,000
- Number of online engagements with funded activity. Target for Fund: 3 million
- Percentage of in-person engagements outside of London and outside 10-mile radius of archive base. Target for Fund: 70%
Accessibility
- Accessible screenings, events or online engagements (subtitled, audio described, hard of hearing, relaxed screenings – dementia, autism/neuro-diverse/family friendly). Target: 20%
- Percentage of projects available online. Target: 30%
Environment
Successful organisational applicants will need to ensure they have an effective plan for collecting the above data where it is relevant to the Skills activity being funded. The BFI will work with funded organisations to agree a plan for measuring the longer-term impacts of their funded activity.
Three principles of our funding
In addition, all National Lottery awards must deliver against our three principles for National Lottery funding:
Equity, diversity and inclusion
We champion everyday inclusion at the BFI. A clearly defined and communicated set of Inclusion Targets gives us, our partners and the wider industry ambitious goals for a more diverse screen sector and representative audiences. The activity of this Fund, in terms of who Organisational Skills funding reaches, will contribute towards achieving the BFI’s Inclusion Targets, which are:
- Disability (including those identifying as D/deaf or neurodiverse and those with a longstanding physical or mental diagnosis) 18%
- Black and Global Majority (London) 40%
- Black and Global Majority (outside London) 30%
- Gender (50-50 balance of male and female identifying within the gender binary) 50%
- Sexual identity – those identifying as LGB+ 10%
- Working class background 39%
BFI Diversity Standards
All of the activity supported by our funding is informed by the BFI Diversity Standards. We welcome activity that seeks to remove barriers and level the playing field when it comes to who can gain the skills needed within the Screen Heritage sector, in relation to disability, gender, race, age, sexual orientation and socio-economic status. You can also consider the interactions of these identities and any other barriers to opportunity. If successful, you will need to report, following the conclusion of your activity, evaluating how you have delivered against the aims of the Diversity Standards in practice.
Applicants whose projects create digital outputs should ensure that the outputs are accessible for all, including following best practice for disability access requirements and, where online, are available to view free of charge.
UK-wide
The BFI funds activity throughout the UK. This includes national, regional and local provision to ensure that communities throughout the UK feel the benefit of the screen industries and culture. You’ll need to tell us where your proposed activity will be delivered and how this will support the BFI’s UK-wide principle.
Applicants are encouraged to make use of partnership working to achieve their aims. This may include collaborating pan-regionally, working with the membership network Film Archives UK, with the BFI National Archive, the film exhibition sector, schools and education partners, and with other film archives in their regions and UK wide.
Environmental sustainability
You’ll need to tell us how you will embed the principle of environmental sustainability throughout your funded activity. This includes describing what you’re doing to reduce your negative impact (such as reducing carbon emissions or minimising single-use plastic) as well as what you’re doing to increase your positive impact. If you are offered the award, BFI can support you in addressing this principle.
We encourage knowledge exchange and collaboration across screen archives and with other organisations that leads to the reduction of carbon emissions and negative impacts on biodiversity, smarter working and shared initiatives that meet environmental sustainability principles.
3. Check if you’re eligible
Your organisation
Funding is available to support organisations that hold and operate a screen heritage collection and meet the parameters set out in this section. For the purposes of these guidelines, screen includes any moving image or audio-visual format but excludes paper or other static form, sound or music. Heritage means the preservation, conservation, cataloguing and making accessible that screen collection. The screen heritage activity may form the sole or a partial activity of an eligible organisation.
Your organisation must be a legally constituted organisation centrally managed in the UK:
- Charity or trust registered with the Charity Commission (including UK universities and colleges)
- Limited Liability Company registered at Companies House
- Community Interest Company registered at Companies House
- Combined or local authority or statutory body
- and must operate an archive, collection network or similar whose remit is to collect, preserve or make screen collections freely accessible to the general public (that is it must operate on a not-for profit basis)
Individuals cannot apply.
Organisations that hold screen collections but that are primarily engaged in the distribution or exhibition of that screen content for profit are also ineligible.
All funded activity needs to be completed by 31 March 2026. You can make multiple applications for Organisational Skills funding, and we recognise that the timing of some elements of activity may need to overlap. You will need to demonstrate the capacity to deliver multiple projects at the same time – this means describing the staffing and other necessary resources you will have in place.
Please contact us if you’re unsure whether your organisation is eligible for this fund: screenheritagefund@bfi.org.uk
4. What you can use the funding for
You can apply for between £1,000 and £25,000.
National Lottery funds can only be awarded to applicants who demonstrate need and a clear public benefit from the activity being funded. This Fund is not intended to substitute or replace existing funding or income that would otherwise be available, or to support activity at the same scale that can go ahead without our funding. We seek to maximise the reach of our funding and value for money is important to us, so requests for higher amounts will need to show a greater level of impact and benefit to the sector.
Funding can be used to deliver discrete time-limited initiatives with defined benefits and outputs aimed directly at those working within, or seeking to work within, the screen heritage sector. These could include:
- Addressing the shared national challenge of skills required for collecting contemporary screen works including working on digital preservation workflows and systems, and finding solutions for collecting digital materials
- Developing and implementing plans to address gaps in the organisation’s skills and workforce with a clear focus on ensuring that its screen heritage workforce better represents the diversity of communities across the UK
- Offering opportunities for professional development, and entry level training in screen heritage
- Offering opportunities for your staff to undertake training (possibly equivalent to trainee placements, internships or apprenticeships) at other screen heritage organisations to gain new skills and improve existing ones
- Knowledge sharing and collaboration across archives and cultural partners facilitating skills development
- Activity ensuring that the heritage workforce better represents the diversity of communities across the UK
- Engaging with national and international training and professional development opportunities, attending conferences, networking meetings and other events, in-person and online, in the UK and abroad, to learn and share skills, expertise and experience – for example through an umbrella application for multiple staff members to attend a training event; covering membership fees for multiple staff to join sector associations; or partner with an international training provider to deliver professional development activities in the UK. Staff members seeking support for individual training or professional development activity should apply through our bursary scheme – Individual Skills funding guidelines
- ensuring that learnings are made widely accessible and further help the screen heritage sector thrive through a strong commitment to knowledge sharing and information exchange
Eligible costs
Eligible costs include, but are not limited to:
- Activities that provide the screen heritage sector with skills development and (if directly relevant) broader professional development opportunities
- Staff costs and overheads required for direct delivery of skills activities, which cannot be covered by other sources of funding and do not cover the day to day running of your organisation or costs associated with organisational continuity, whilst staff attend longer term training or other professional development opportunities, including hiring replacement staff to cover paid sabbatical leave
- Accessibility measures and activities
- Marketing and promotion of the skills activity
- Evaluation of the impact of skills activity
- Hire or purchase of materials or equipment required to deliver training activity, at a cap of £3,000
- Trainers and facilitators
- Reasonable travel, accommodation and subsistence costs
- Costs of engaging staff who have left the sector, on a freelance short-term basis, to enable transfer and retention of knowledge
- Costs related to paid training placements
- Fees for professional memberships or associations relating to directly to delivery of skills development or access to international training opportunities
We will review all of the costs you are seeking support for, and if we are interested in supporting your application, may ask you to make adjustments to your budget including removing or reducing specific lines.
Ineligible costs
Examples of common ineligible costs:
- Core costs for day to day running of your organisation not associated with the activity
- Costs relating to an extension of ongoing work
- Capital expenditure
- Activity that is already specifically supported by another external source of funding
- Proposals that focus on other heritage areas such as paper collections or sound
- Proposals that focus on the development of non-heritage skills
- Cost incurred prior to an offer of funding from BFI
- Promotional materials or other activity (stands, printed brochures) which do not support an environmental sustainability policy.
BFI National Lottery Funding is project-based, time-limited funding, and as such, there should be no expectation of ongoing support beyond the term of any awards made. All funded activity needs to be completed by 31 March 2026.
Please note, if you are registered for VAT, your figures should not include VAT that you can claim back. If you are not registered for VAT, or you are registered for VAT but cannot fully recover the VAT you incur on costs, your figures should include irrecoverable VAT. Grants we make are ‘outside the scope’ of VAT and should be listed in your accounts as a grant and not, for example, as a fee for any services supplied to the BFI. You should get financial advice from your own accountant or the relevant tax office.
Partnership funding for Organisational Skills awards
You do not have to raise additional finance for your Skills activity, if you can deliver it with the amount of funding you are requesting from the BFI. However, partnership contributions (cash or in-kind) are a helpful indication that there is genuine support for your project from your community, stakeholders and other partners.
If you are aiming to raise partnership funding, it does not have to be secured at the point of application. Contributions can be from your own organisation or third parties but not from other BFI National Lottery funds.
5. How to apply
This Organisational Skills programme is open year-round, and applications are accepted on a rolling basis.
You can choose to either send us an Expression of Interest (EOI) first, which we will provide feedback on, or to complete a full application. We will confirm the receipt of EOIs within two working days and aim to review them within 10 working days. If your EOI indicates that you and your project are eligible for funding and you wish to proceed with the request, you will then need to complete a full application.
We’ll complete an initial review of full applications and request any additional information we need within four weeks.
We aim to take a decision within 12 weeks of your full application being submitted. If we need additional information from you, it may take us longer to reach a decision on your application.
Completing your application
You will need to create an account to make your application online.
You can save your application and return to it later. If you intend to apply for more than one Skills project, you will need to complete an application for each project separately.
Please make sure to complete all the sections – incomplete forms will be automatically ineligible.
You can view a PDF preview of the Expression of Interest (EOI) and application form below.
Information you need to provide
The application form will ask you for the following information:
Applicant information
A description of your screen heritage collection and activity to confirm your eligibility for funding.
Your proposal
An overview of your activity describing:
- The activity itself – what it comprises, the timeline, and the resources and infrastructure you have in place to enable successful delivery
- The specific challenges or opportunities that you want to address via this activity
- How the proposed activity will address these and the difference you believe you will make
- Any resources your activity will develop
- Description of partnerships and collaborations, if applicable
- How you are addressing environmental sustainability and ecological impact as part of the activity, identifying the specific actions you will take
- Your plans for monitoring and evaluation
- How the proposal supports equity, diversity and inclusion, including the extent to which your skills activity reflects or responds to a diversity of cultures, lived experiences and perspectives
- How your proposal will address BFI National Lottery Funding Plan objective 3, and any secondary benefits in addressing objectives 1 or 4
Finance and deliverables
- Your total project budget amount, and the amount you are requesting from the BFI
- If applicable, a description of your partnership funding and its status – this can include sponsorship, grants and projected income
- A statement as to why the costs applied for cannot be covered from other sources; why National Lottery funding is needed and what difference it will make
- Your ‘deliverables’ – the specific activity you will deliver using the funding
- A description of the risks you foresee relating to your activity and how you will mitigate these
- A plan for knowledge exchange with peers in the screen heritage sector
Attachments
You will need to attach the following documents to your application:
- Project budget using template provided
- Your last set of independently certified / audited accounts
- if more than 12 months has passed since the year-end covered in your certified accounts, please additionally provide draft accounts for the intervening auditable period as approved by your Board (including both income and expenditure reporting and a balance sheet)
Download the Skills award Budget template
Equality monitoring
You’ll need to complete a mandatory equality monitoring form along with your application. The form asks for demographic information on your staff. Please complete it for your organisation only, not the staff of any parent organisation that you sit within and who do not work directly on archive activity. Equality monitoring form responses are anonymous and confidential and aren’t used in the assessment process.
6. What happens after you apply?
How your application is assessed
When assessing your application, we consider:
Strategic aims
- To what extent does the application make a strong contribution to addressing the:
- Aims articulated in the Overview; and
- Delivering against our National Lottery Strategy
- How clear are the challenges and opportunities the proposal seeks to address
- How clear is the articulation of the difference the proposal will make
- How strong is the need for National Lottery funding
Strength and quality of the delivery and management plans
- To what extent does the proposal demonstrate:
- That the proposed activity is strategic, robust and logistically viable
- That applicants and any partners have the relevant skills, time and expertise to deliver and achieve a successful outcome
- That mitigation plans for risks are in place
- That there are clear plans for monitoring and evaluation
Long-term impact
- What the legacy or outcome of the activity is likely to be, without further support from BFI National Lottery funds
- The environmental impact of the activity
- To what extent will the workforce development outcomes of the project last beyond its delivery period
Finances and resources
- To what extent do applicants show:
- That their organisation is financially secure
- A feasible budget that covers the necessary expenditure
- That the activity represents good value for money
- Evidence of partnership working where appropriate
- Clarity as to what BFI National Lottery funding will be used for and why it is needed. We can only support activity that genuinely requires public funding to take place
We also consider how you have managed any previous BFI awards and where your activity will take place, as we aim to make awards across the UK.
How we prioritise applications
We get a lot of applications and cannot support them all. We will prioritise proposals that:
- Clearly address the National Lottery Strategy objectives and outcomes
- Are closest to the Fund’s aims as articulated in the Overview
- Are likely to have the biggest impact on the screen heritage sector
- Offer value for money
- Try new approaches or have the potential to develop practice that may benefit the wider sector
Assessment
Applications will be reviewed by an assessment panel that will include the BFI Screen Heritage Fund team and invited experts. We may also share parts of your application with other BFI teams or external consultants to help us assess it.
Funding recommendations will then be submitted to the BFI Lottery Finance Committee for decision.
Lottery Finance Committee Consideration
Following assessment of each application, we will make funding recommendations to the BFI Lottery Finance Committee. This is the final stage of the funding decision process.
We undertake due diligence assessments of the applications we are recommending to our decision-making committee for funding. As part of this, before sharing the application with the committee, we will request the bank details of the organisation applying.
7. Getting a decision
If you’re successful
- You will receive a written offer of funding
- You will need to sign the offer of funding and return it to the BFI within 14 days
Your offer of funding will set out details of how you’ll receive the funding, how to use it and how we expect you to report to us.
If you’re unsuccessful
We may have turned down your application because we determined that the proposal:
- Did not sufficiently address the National Lottery Strategy objectives and outcomes
- Did not address the Fund’s aims as articulated in the Overview
- Did not demonstrate a strong enough commitment to one or more of the following principles: equity, diversity and inclusion; UK-wide; environmental sustainability
- Was not yet developed enough
- Did not demonstrate sufficient need for National Lottery support and could be financed by other means
- Did not sufficiently address the BFI Diversity Standards
We will keep the data and supporting materials you sent to us in line with our records retention policy.
Feedback on an unsuccessful application
You will receive feedback on your EOI if you choose to complete it. We will do our best to offer feedback to all unsuccessful applicants, but as a small team we can’t guarantee it. We always welcome your feedback on the application process and how we might improve it.
8. Conditions of funding
If you are offered you funding, in addition to the General Conditions of National Lottery Funding for successful applicants, the following conditions will apply to your award:
- You will be required to complete interim and final reports on your activity (the frequency of reporting will be determined by the duration of the activity being undertaken), including a narrative report, cost report and KPI reporting
- We may ask you to meet with us to review the progress of your activity
- You will be required to work collaboratively with relevant BFI departments and partners
- You may be advised to discuss your plans for any activity that develops digital preservation methodology with the BFI National Archive to ensure cross-sector uniformity of standards are applied
- You will need to adopt safeguarding provisions for protecting children and vulnerable adults where appropriate
- You will be required to work with Julie’s Bicycle to assess the environmental impact of your funded activity, including calculating its carbon footprint. We will offer you guidance and resources on how to deliver your activity sustainably