Class struggles
Changes to the national curriculum have created new challenges for museums in their attempts to attract school visits. Deborah Mulhearn reports
Education has been a bit of political battleground in recent years and museums have been hit by some of the fallout. Dealing with recent changes to the national curriculum for schools has been particularly challenging for museums in England.
The Department for Education, which has introduced the changes, covers schools in England only, so education in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales is unaffected by the current revisions.
The biggest impact has been felt by single-subject or period museums where traditional history subjects popular with younger children have been moved from the primary (key stages 1 and 2) to the secondary school curriculum (key stages 3 and 4). Some museums have reported a decline in visits and bookings, particularly where the curriculum areas are no longer relevant.
“Our bookings for the Victorians and second world war topics, which have moved from KS2 to KS3, have dropped dramatically,” says Eleanor Payne, the learning officer at Hertford Museum, a small independent museum.
Finding the money and development time to refocus their schools offer has been difficult for museums, especially the smaller ones, but changes have motivated them to look again at their collections and resources.
“This year is shaping up to be a big learning curve,” Payne says. “But if you have a good relationship with the schools in your area you can try to discover their fears and needs. There are issues around knowledge on the museum side but unless we face these we are not going to be able to give teachers the confidence they need.”
Payne spent the year prior to the changes rewriting her materials to fit the new curriculum requirements, including new headings and topic names, for paper resources, email lists, pdfs and online content, to provide a consistent message and guide for teachers.
“It was fairly straightforward to rebrand the lost topics as local history,” Payne says. “It’s not an exact science, but it is about being adaptable, realistic and open to new ideas.
“I was daunted and anxious at first but it’s given us the opportunity to reassess the quality of our service and to ensure our partnerships are still strong,” she continues.
“There are ways to refresh your offer – if school visits drop off, try looking at your family offer, for example.”
Museum services with a number of sites have been able to spread the impact of the changes to the national curriculum.
“We had to be realistic about the changes,” says Rachel Macfarlane, the learning and engagement officer at Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service. “We knew that our Tudor site, Christchurch Mansion, would not have as big a pull for schools with the loss of Tudors and Victorians to KS2.
"But we’ve been able to use wider museum projects to refocus our offer, those which luckily came along at the same time as the curriculum changes and provide an opportunity to develop art and literacy activities for schools.”
Responsiveness
Regional museum services have to work hard to build and maintain relationships with schools across a wide area, points out Macfarlane.
“But the costs and risks for schools can be offset if you can demonstrate that the children will have an inspiring and enjoyable experience,” she says.
“It’s partly down to marketing, but communication is just as important. We knew that the great artists would feature, and with already having a fantastic art collection at Christchurch Mansion, it was a case of keeping in regular contact with our education advisers.”
But for larger museums and those with broad-ranging content, there are still some concerns. Frazer Swift, the head of learning at the Museum of London, says that it has not seen a decline that can be attributed to curriculum changes.
However, he says it has been difficult to plan with any degree of confidence: “Our consultations with teachers so far have been inconclusive in terms of how we might expect school visiting patterns to change – for example, how teachers might approach local history.
“We are fortunate that the new history curriculum presents us with a number of opportunities, and, overall, our numbers are rising,” Swift says.
“For example, as a museum about London, we are well placed to respond to the increased emphasis on local history, and the introduction of prehistory for the first time at KS2 enabled us to develop new sessions and teacher-training courses that are already unable to meet demand.”
But school budgets have been systematically eroded for some time, and primary-school teachers are understandably reticent about museum visits while they are still trying to get to grips with the changes. Secondary schools have further pressures because of timetable restrictions.
The biggest impact on secondary schools is the shift to exam-based learning. This in turn creates a downward pressure on museum visits, because teachers are focused on getting the children through their exams.
“Trips out shouldn’t just be an end of term reward,” says Nick Winterbotham, the interim director of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Buckinghamshire and former chair of the Group for Education in Museums.
“They are also a chance to apply subject matter to so many different subjects and curriculum areas. Seeing science in context in a museum, for example, can help switch children onto difficult subjects.
“But a positive effect of the changes has been the many conversations about the purpose of a trip to the local museum, and it has led to a better understanding and relationships that could pre-empt good practice,” Winterbotham says.
All school subjects have seen changes to their content, though some have seen more radical changes. For example, computer coding is now compulsory for primary-age pupils, helping museums such as Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, which tells the story of the second world war codebreakers. The museum’s subject matter is also ideal for maths teaching and it is developing its resources in this area.
History, however, is the subject that most directly affects museums, and this has also seen some of the most controversial changes. The main difference is that the prehistory has been introduced at KS2, and the curriculum now advises tackling topics in chronological order, working up to KS4.
This change has caused the most anxiety, as many museums have neither the prehistory collections nor the experience to teach the subject.
Supporting educators
Introducing stone age and iron age prehistory at KS2, where previously the curriculum only went as far back as the Romans, has been challenging for museums and schools, says Pippa Smith, a freelance archaeology and heritage specialist.
“It’s exciting from my point of view, but the problem is how it’s being interpreted,” Smith says. “The curriculum is laid out chronologically, and a lot of emphasis is being placed on children learning in the order that things happened. In one way this is logical, but many adults struggle to grasp the chronology of prehistory, never mind seven year olds.”
Museums are also finding it challenging to help schools with the chronology. “There is solid, visible evidence for the Romans,” Smith continues. “But as you start going back in time, collections get sparser and sparser, and they are also more geographically spread. Items themselves, such as flint, which can be sharp, are not always suitable for handling, either.”
On the plus side, teachers like familiarity, and the confidence gained from a quality museum experience goes a long way. If a museum is worried, Smith says, they should contact the schools they know well from years of visits.
“There’s no need to panic,” she says. “There is a lot of wiggle room and the cross-curricular aspects can be emphasised – museums are wonderful for literacy and numeracy. They are great places to learn to write and describe but also for data handling and trying out apps for the new computing requirements.
"Many aspects of the new curriculum are voluntary as well, and museums could have relevant collections to extend children’s chronological knowledge beyond 1066. There is lots of potential.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
Education work in museums often takes place in one of the many spaces funded by the Clore Duffield Foundation.
The charitable foundation, a grant-making charity that supports cultural learning, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As part of this it recently announced plans to support a further 10 Clore Learning Spaces, which will take the total to 50 across the UK.
About £2.8m will be spent on facilities at a range of sites, including the foundation’s first Clore Learning Centre in Northern Ireland at Hillsborough Castle. The foundation is also giving £300,000 for a learning space at Tate Liverpool.
There will also be a new £100,000 Clore Studio at the House of Illustration in London. (The gallery is reviewed in this issue of Museums Journal.)
The other museums that will benefit from foundation funds are the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, East Sussex (£70,000); the Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire (£100,000); and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (£1m).
“We never set out to have this many learning spaces – we just funded what we cared about – but when we looked back over the years we realised what had been achieved and what it represented in terms of our arts education investment all over the UK, particularly for children,” says Dame Vivien Duffield, the chairwoman of the Clore Duffield Foundation.
“We pay for the bricks and mortar but what we really care about is the people who use our spaces, day in, day out, and the transformative power of the arts within their lives.”
The Clore Duffield Foundation has been funding education spaces within cultural organisations since the 1990s. These now span all four nations and include 22 museums and heritage organisations, 16 galleries, 11 performing arts organisations and a school.
Simon Stephens
Pennine Lancashire Museums, a group of museums that has been collaborating since 2010, is one of 10 participants in Arts Council England’s (ACE) Museums and Schools Programme, which targets schools that have never engaged with museums.
As part of the programme, a number of school learning sessions have been developed at the museums across the group, including at Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Burnley. These include a project developed with a local primary school.
“Instead of taking a straightforward historical approach, the teacher used the concepts of rhythm, sound and poetry in relation to the machinery, and it was all done from the children’s imaginations,” says Gill Brailey, the heritage learning manager for Lancashire County Council’s cultural services.
The music and literacy session helps children to find out about what makes up a Lancashire loom, what they sound like and how they move. The children then work together to become a human loom.
“The ACE funding has bought us valuable time to work closely with teachers,” Brailey says. “The teachers visited our sites and identified items – we made it a stipulation that they worked to the new curriculum.
"It’s all about the creative curriculum but the children also developed their numeracy and literacy skills, for example sequencing from the flow of power through the machinery and onomatopoeia from the sound of the looms, as well as the obvious links to history and technology.
“The programme has given our museums confidence to find new ways to use their collections but also to develop conversations with schools. It is often difficult for museums to make contact as teachers are very busy, and too often they sit in isolation trying to second-guess what teachers want.
"We now have teachers, who are not part of the Museums and Schools Programme, approaching us, because they have seen the benefits.”
The Department for Education, which has introduced the changes, covers schools in England only, so education in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales is unaffected by the current revisions.
The biggest impact has been felt by single-subject or period museums where traditional history subjects popular with younger children have been moved from the primary (key stages 1 and 2) to the secondary school curriculum (key stages 3 and 4). Some museums have reported a decline in visits and bookings, particularly where the curriculum areas are no longer relevant.
“Our bookings for the Victorians and second world war topics, which have moved from KS2 to KS3, have dropped dramatically,” says Eleanor Payne, the learning officer at Hertford Museum, a small independent museum.
Finding the money and development time to refocus their schools offer has been difficult for museums, especially the smaller ones, but changes have motivated them to look again at their collections and resources.
“This year is shaping up to be a big learning curve,” Payne says. “But if you have a good relationship with the schools in your area you can try to discover their fears and needs. There are issues around knowledge on the museum side but unless we face these we are not going to be able to give teachers the confidence they need.”
Payne spent the year prior to the changes rewriting her materials to fit the new curriculum requirements, including new headings and topic names, for paper resources, email lists, pdfs and online content, to provide a consistent message and guide for teachers.
“It was fairly straightforward to rebrand the lost topics as local history,” Payne says. “It’s not an exact science, but it is about being adaptable, realistic and open to new ideas.
“I was daunted and anxious at first but it’s given us the opportunity to reassess the quality of our service and to ensure our partnerships are still strong,” she continues.
“There are ways to refresh your offer – if school visits drop off, try looking at your family offer, for example.”
Museum services with a number of sites have been able to spread the impact of the changes to the national curriculum.
“We had to be realistic about the changes,” says Rachel Macfarlane, the learning and engagement officer at Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service. “We knew that our Tudor site, Christchurch Mansion, would not have as big a pull for schools with the loss of Tudors and Victorians to KS2.
"But we’ve been able to use wider museum projects to refocus our offer, those which luckily came along at the same time as the curriculum changes and provide an opportunity to develop art and literacy activities for schools.”
Responsiveness
Regional museum services have to work hard to build and maintain relationships with schools across a wide area, points out Macfarlane.
“But the costs and risks for schools can be offset if you can demonstrate that the children will have an inspiring and enjoyable experience,” she says.
“It’s partly down to marketing, but communication is just as important. We knew that the great artists would feature, and with already having a fantastic art collection at Christchurch Mansion, it was a case of keeping in regular contact with our education advisers.”
But for larger museums and those with broad-ranging content, there are still some concerns. Frazer Swift, the head of learning at the Museum of London, says that it has not seen a decline that can be attributed to curriculum changes.
However, he says it has been difficult to plan with any degree of confidence: “Our consultations with teachers so far have been inconclusive in terms of how we might expect school visiting patterns to change – for example, how teachers might approach local history.
“We are fortunate that the new history curriculum presents us with a number of opportunities, and, overall, our numbers are rising,” Swift says.
“For example, as a museum about London, we are well placed to respond to the increased emphasis on local history, and the introduction of prehistory for the first time at KS2 enabled us to develop new sessions and teacher-training courses that are already unable to meet demand.”
But school budgets have been systematically eroded for some time, and primary-school teachers are understandably reticent about museum visits while they are still trying to get to grips with the changes. Secondary schools have further pressures because of timetable restrictions.
The biggest impact on secondary schools is the shift to exam-based learning. This in turn creates a downward pressure on museum visits, because teachers are focused on getting the children through their exams.
“Trips out shouldn’t just be an end of term reward,” says Nick Winterbotham, the interim director of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Buckinghamshire and former chair of the Group for Education in Museums.
“They are also a chance to apply subject matter to so many different subjects and curriculum areas. Seeing science in context in a museum, for example, can help switch children onto difficult subjects.
“But a positive effect of the changes has been the many conversations about the purpose of a trip to the local museum, and it has led to a better understanding and relationships that could pre-empt good practice,” Winterbotham says.
All school subjects have seen changes to their content, though some have seen more radical changes. For example, computer coding is now compulsory for primary-age pupils, helping museums such as Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, which tells the story of the second world war codebreakers. The museum’s subject matter is also ideal for maths teaching and it is developing its resources in this area.
History, however, is the subject that most directly affects museums, and this has also seen some of the most controversial changes. The main difference is that the prehistory has been introduced at KS2, and the curriculum now advises tackling topics in chronological order, working up to KS4.
This change has caused the most anxiety, as many museums have neither the prehistory collections nor the experience to teach the subject.
Supporting educators
Introducing stone age and iron age prehistory at KS2, where previously the curriculum only went as far back as the Romans, has been challenging for museums and schools, says Pippa Smith, a freelance archaeology and heritage specialist.
“It’s exciting from my point of view, but the problem is how it’s being interpreted,” Smith says. “The curriculum is laid out chronologically, and a lot of emphasis is being placed on children learning in the order that things happened. In one way this is logical, but many adults struggle to grasp the chronology of prehistory, never mind seven year olds.”
Museums are also finding it challenging to help schools with the chronology. “There is solid, visible evidence for the Romans,” Smith continues. “But as you start going back in time, collections get sparser and sparser, and they are also more geographically spread. Items themselves, such as flint, which can be sharp, are not always suitable for handling, either.”
On the plus side, teachers like familiarity, and the confidence gained from a quality museum experience goes a long way. If a museum is worried, Smith says, they should contact the schools they know well from years of visits.
“There’s no need to panic,” she says. “There is a lot of wiggle room and the cross-curricular aspects can be emphasised – museums are wonderful for literacy and numeracy. They are great places to learn to write and describe but also for data handling and trying out apps for the new computing requirements.
"Many aspects of the new curriculum are voluntary as well, and museums could have relevant collections to extend children’s chronological knowledge beyond 1066. There is lots of potential.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance journalist
Spaces for learning
Education work in museums often takes place in one of the many spaces funded by the Clore Duffield Foundation.
The charitable foundation, a grant-making charity that supports cultural learning, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As part of this it recently announced plans to support a further 10 Clore Learning Spaces, which will take the total to 50 across the UK.
About £2.8m will be spent on facilities at a range of sites, including the foundation’s first Clore Learning Centre in Northern Ireland at Hillsborough Castle. The foundation is also giving £300,000 for a learning space at Tate Liverpool.
There will also be a new £100,000 Clore Studio at the House of Illustration in London. (The gallery is reviewed in this issue of Museums Journal.)
The other museums that will benefit from foundation funds are the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, East Sussex (£70,000); the Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire (£100,000); and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (£1m).
“We never set out to have this many learning spaces – we just funded what we cared about – but when we looked back over the years we realised what had been achieved and what it represented in terms of our arts education investment all over the UK, particularly for children,” says Dame Vivien Duffield, the chairwoman of the Clore Duffield Foundation.
“We pay for the bricks and mortar but what we really care about is the people who use our spaces, day in, day out, and the transformative power of the arts within their lives.”
The Clore Duffield Foundation has been funding education spaces within cultural organisations since the 1990s. These now span all four nations and include 22 museums and heritage organisations, 16 galleries, 11 performing arts organisations and a school.
Simon Stephens
Arts council scheme for schools link-up
Pennine Lancashire Museums, a group of museums that has been collaborating since 2010, is one of 10 participants in Arts Council England’s (ACE) Museums and Schools Programme, which targets schools that have never engaged with museums.
As part of the programme, a number of school learning sessions have been developed at the museums across the group, including at Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Burnley. These include a project developed with a local primary school.
“Instead of taking a straightforward historical approach, the teacher used the concepts of rhythm, sound and poetry in relation to the machinery, and it was all done from the children’s imaginations,” says Gill Brailey, the heritage learning manager for Lancashire County Council’s cultural services.
The music and literacy session helps children to find out about what makes up a Lancashire loom, what they sound like and how they move. The children then work together to become a human loom.
“The ACE funding has bought us valuable time to work closely with teachers,” Brailey says. “The teachers visited our sites and identified items – we made it a stipulation that they worked to the new curriculum.
"It’s all about the creative curriculum but the children also developed their numeracy and literacy skills, for example sequencing from the flow of power through the machinery and onomatopoeia from the sound of the looms, as well as the obvious links to history and technology.
“The programme has given our museums confidence to find new ways to use their collections but also to develop conversations with schools. It is often difficult for museums to make contact as teachers are very busy, and too often they sit in isolation trying to second-guess what teachers want.
"We now have teachers, who are not part of the Museums and Schools Programme, approaching us, because they have seen the benefits.”