Strategic thinking
Three of the four nations in the UK have a national museum strategy. Geraldine Kendall reports on how they are being implemented and what some of the pitfalls are
Wales got off to a flying start, Northern Ireland isn’t far behind and Scotland is just about catching up – but England isn’t even on the table yet.
No, it’s nothing to do with the rugby – over the past few years, governments in the devolved nations have all published joined-up national strategies for the museum sector, and what started out as lofty ideals are gradually evolving into tangible actions.
Cymal: Museums, Archives and Libraries Wales became the first government department to publish its five-year national strategy in 2010. Northern Ireland’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (Dcal) followed a year later with its 10-year museum policy, while the Scottish government’s strategy came out in March 2012.
Although a majority of museums in each nation have been in favour, the benefits of having a strategic framework for the sector as a whole are still being debated.
Proponents say it offers greater clarity of purpose and affords institutions of all sizes and types a greater opportunity to work together cohesively, share expertise and – importantly right now – do more with less.
Having a strategic business plan also puts the sector at the heart of the government agenda, they argue, enabling museums to demonstrate their impact where it matters.
Cynics wonder if this approach might bring too much political interference and top-down control to bear on museum policy. Others question whether museums are simply too diverse to be truly served by one overarching vision, and risk becoming too homogenised.
But with some strategies now a few years down the line – rolled out against a background of massive funding cuts and government changeover – how are they really faring?
In Wales, the Federation of Museums and Art Galleries of Wales (the Fed) was closely involved in both the initial development and subsequent implementation of the strategy.
The final document offers a route map towards achieving three key principles: museums for everyone; a collection for the nation; and working effectively. Other activities, such as volunteering and skills development, were prioritised after consultation with the sector.
“Most people wouldn’t look at it as the Welsh government’s strategy,” says the Welsh Fed’s president, Rachael Rogers. “It did come from Cymal, but they worked very closely with the sector to find out what people wanted.”
Welsh engagement
“One of the key things we did was about raising awareness of the strategy – talking to people through sessions so they knew how they could fit into it.”
As well as an action plan, which is reviewed every year, the Fed offers online resources for museums to share information and strengthen their networks.
Cymal has also devoted £100,000 to developing one of the strategy’s big ideas – a distributed national collection programme to create networks between similar collections held in museums. This aims to increase audience engagement and allow museums to take a coordinated approach to collections management and research.
The programme has developed a scheme, funded by the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, to enable specialist curators from Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales to assist smaller museums in reviewing and linking their natural science collections.
For other projects, Cymal – as the main source of grant funding in Wales – is able to implement the strategy primarily through its existing funding criteria, asking museums to consider how their projects relate to key goals in all grant applications.
Rather than being dictatorial, says Rogers, this approach has “given people common goals at a time when they feel quite vulnerable about cuts and budgets”.
“People can dip in and out of it as much as they like,” she adds. “You can contribute partly by doing what you’re doing, but the framework drives you on. It helps you think about the things you know you should be doing, but never seem to get around to.”
The Fed has also found that the strategy document is being used as an advocacy tool with bodies such as local authorities, says Rogers, because it helps people outside the sector to “get a sense of what museums are about”.
As the heritage officer for Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council, Frank Olding works across a number of small volunteer-run museums. “As far as we’re concerned the strategy is being carried out on a daily basis because Cymal are putting their money where their mouth is,” says Olding.
A cohesive sector
The council is moving into the second year of a three-year project aimed at boosting access to heritage, funded jointly by Cymal and the Heritage Lottery Fund, which was designed with the strategy’s aspirations in mind, particularly education and documentation.
The grant has enabled Blaenau Gwent to employ an officer to help museums digitise their records and put them online.
“It’s a concrete impact, a person out there working with museums on their documentation,” says Olding. “Without the strategy we wouldn’t have that.”
Olding agrees that the strategy brings a greater sense of perspective to everyday museum activity. “When you’re at the chalkface you can lose sight of those overarching aspirations, but the strategy brings them into effect at grassroots level.”
He does, however, differ with Rogers on how much choice museums really have to opt in or out. A top-down strategy has a particularly strong infl uence in a sector as small as Wales, says Olding, where there are just a few key stakeholders and one national museum body.
“Personally I find it prescriptive, but that’s a consequence of having a strategy, isn’t it? It does give the sector in Wales a cohesion it didn’t have before.
“The flipside is that you can gain access to government much more easily here,” he adds. “The culture minister is quite prepared to come and spend an afternoon talking to us – in England he would arrive in a flurry of civil servants, talk for 15 minutes and bugger off again.”
That accessibility can be helpful if the government is sympathetic to your plans – but it’s no use if the culture minister in question has little interest in having a strategy in the first place.
This was the problem facing the museum sector in Northern Ireland, where, according to one museum professional involved in the process, the culture department proved “extremely resistant” to the idea of drawing up what would later become the Northern Ireland Museums Policy.
“There was quite a bit of tension between [the museum sector] and the department,” says the professional.
After some internal wrangling, the plan was given the green light by a subsequent culture minister, Nelson McCausland.
But even after that, the sector got an early
taste of the kind of unwelcome political meddling that can come from moving closer to government, after McCausland infamously urged museums to give more recognition to creationism in their displays.
Chris Bailey is the director of the Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC), the arm’s length body for museums that, together with National Museums Northern Ireland, was the driving force behind the strategy and is now charged with delivering it.
“It was a long, drawn out process, to the extent that it was only relatively recently that [the government] said ‘here’s the implementation plan’,” he says. “But that hasn’t stopped us from cracking ahead with it.”
The policy is structured around four pillars: collections management, use and care; audiences; education and learning; and infrastructure and resources.
The NIMC has based its business plans on those objectives and will allocate grants accordingly, but the council’s ability to move the policy forward is impeded by cuts to its own budget and funding reductions across the sector.
“We’ll deliver on policy but there are no new resources and budgets have diminished,” says Bailey. “The challenges of having less money do call into question the appropriateness of some of the goals – for example, increasing visitors to museums. One must be pragmatic.
“We only get a drop in the bucket so to expect us to deliver across all of those [goals] might be ambitious. We’ll focus on where we have the greatest effect or the greatest need.”
Adding to the upheaval is the fact that the local government in Northern Ireland is undergoing a significant restructure. “The policy has a 10-year horizon so we’ve got to take a long view on this,” says Bailey.
Scottish delays
The Scottish museum sector’s development of a national strategy has not been without its own bumps in the road.
When the final document, Going Further, came out a year ago, it was generally well received – though it met with some criticism for being too anodyne and broad.
However, the restructuring of Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS), which is transforming from a membership organisation to a strategic development body and has been given £3.3m to deliver the strategy over the next three years, has come in for more censure.
Objections over MGS’s new internally-appointed board and its subscription model, which – unlike similar bodies in the other nations – requires museums to pay to access services, have been partly responsible for pushing back the publication of the strategy’s delivery plan. For its part, MGS says the subscription model is the only sustainable option in a tough funding climate.
This delay has led to some disquiet within the sector. “It’s very disappointing that it will not feature in our forward planning for 2013-14,” says one museum director.
“Everybody is still very positive and keen to get started. But when you look at Wales, which has been very coordinated, I’m embarrassed we haven’t got our act together.”
The delivery plan will be released as soon as it has been approved by the new MGS board. But Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland, thinks the delay shouldn’t hold museums back from making use of the strategy document. NMS has already integrated it into its own planning, he says.
“As soon as the strategy was announced, expectations were raised, but it was always more likely to take some time to get going,” adds Rintoul.
MGS has launched or redesigned a number of investment streams to align with the strategy’s aims, including a strategic investment fund, a skills development fund and a new gateway fund to improve standards at museums that are not yet Accredited.
A detailed report based on the organisation’s consultation with the sector last year over the delivery plan is also imminent. Joanne Orr, the chief executive of MGS, says the data will be used to establish a baseline showing what resources will be needed to deliver the strategy.
The research was also vital for highlighting gaps in areas such as leadership and entrepreneurial skills that can now be addressed, she adds.
And what about England’s national strategy? After an attempt to draft one in 2009, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has made little reference to the subject.
Most of those involved in the devolved nations’ strategies agree that the process would be more difficult in England’s much larger sector, with so many more nationals, funders and stakeholders vying for input. But in difficult times, it might be more important than ever for museums to become greater than the sum of their parts.
“Having a whole nation behind a single vision is amazing,” says Orr. “There’s an openness to working together that we haven’t seen for a long time.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
Around 160 publicly displayed collections, including 87 Accredited museums
Key priorities
42 Accredited museums
Key priorities
More than 340 museums and galleries, including over 260 Accredited institutions
Key priorities
No, it’s nothing to do with the rugby – over the past few years, governments in the devolved nations have all published joined-up national strategies for the museum sector, and what started out as lofty ideals are gradually evolving into tangible actions.
Cymal: Museums, Archives and Libraries Wales became the first government department to publish its five-year national strategy in 2010. Northern Ireland’s Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (Dcal) followed a year later with its 10-year museum policy, while the Scottish government’s strategy came out in March 2012.
Although a majority of museums in each nation have been in favour, the benefits of having a strategic framework for the sector as a whole are still being debated.
Proponents say it offers greater clarity of purpose and affords institutions of all sizes and types a greater opportunity to work together cohesively, share expertise and – importantly right now – do more with less.
Having a strategic business plan also puts the sector at the heart of the government agenda, they argue, enabling museums to demonstrate their impact where it matters.
Cynics wonder if this approach might bring too much political interference and top-down control to bear on museum policy. Others question whether museums are simply too diverse to be truly served by one overarching vision, and risk becoming too homogenised.
But with some strategies now a few years down the line – rolled out against a background of massive funding cuts and government changeover – how are they really faring?
In Wales, the Federation of Museums and Art Galleries of Wales (the Fed) was closely involved in both the initial development and subsequent implementation of the strategy.
The final document offers a route map towards achieving three key principles: museums for everyone; a collection for the nation; and working effectively. Other activities, such as volunteering and skills development, were prioritised after consultation with the sector.
“Most people wouldn’t look at it as the Welsh government’s strategy,” says the Welsh Fed’s president, Rachael Rogers. “It did come from Cymal, but they worked very closely with the sector to find out what people wanted.”
Welsh engagement
“One of the key things we did was about raising awareness of the strategy – talking to people through sessions so they knew how they could fit into it.”
As well as an action plan, which is reviewed every year, the Fed offers online resources for museums to share information and strengthen their networks.
Cymal has also devoted £100,000 to developing one of the strategy’s big ideas – a distributed national collection programme to create networks between similar collections held in museums. This aims to increase audience engagement and allow museums to take a coordinated approach to collections management and research.
The programme has developed a scheme, funded by the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, to enable specialist curators from Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales to assist smaller museums in reviewing and linking their natural science collections.
For other projects, Cymal – as the main source of grant funding in Wales – is able to implement the strategy primarily through its existing funding criteria, asking museums to consider how their projects relate to key goals in all grant applications.
Rather than being dictatorial, says Rogers, this approach has “given people common goals at a time when they feel quite vulnerable about cuts and budgets”.
“People can dip in and out of it as much as they like,” she adds. “You can contribute partly by doing what you’re doing, but the framework drives you on. It helps you think about the things you know you should be doing, but never seem to get around to.”
The Fed has also found that the strategy document is being used as an advocacy tool with bodies such as local authorities, says Rogers, because it helps people outside the sector to “get a sense of what museums are about”.
As the heritage officer for Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council, Frank Olding works across a number of small volunteer-run museums. “As far as we’re concerned the strategy is being carried out on a daily basis because Cymal are putting their money where their mouth is,” says Olding.
A cohesive sector
The council is moving into the second year of a three-year project aimed at boosting access to heritage, funded jointly by Cymal and the Heritage Lottery Fund, which was designed with the strategy’s aspirations in mind, particularly education and documentation.
The grant has enabled Blaenau Gwent to employ an officer to help museums digitise their records and put them online.
“It’s a concrete impact, a person out there working with museums on their documentation,” says Olding. “Without the strategy we wouldn’t have that.”
Olding agrees that the strategy brings a greater sense of perspective to everyday museum activity. “When you’re at the chalkface you can lose sight of those overarching aspirations, but the strategy brings them into effect at grassroots level.”
He does, however, differ with Rogers on how much choice museums really have to opt in or out. A top-down strategy has a particularly strong infl uence in a sector as small as Wales, says Olding, where there are just a few key stakeholders and one national museum body.
“Personally I find it prescriptive, but that’s a consequence of having a strategy, isn’t it? It does give the sector in Wales a cohesion it didn’t have before.
“The flipside is that you can gain access to government much more easily here,” he adds. “The culture minister is quite prepared to come and spend an afternoon talking to us – in England he would arrive in a flurry of civil servants, talk for 15 minutes and bugger off again.”
That accessibility can be helpful if the government is sympathetic to your plans – but it’s no use if the culture minister in question has little interest in having a strategy in the first place.
This was the problem facing the museum sector in Northern Ireland, where, according to one museum professional involved in the process, the culture department proved “extremely resistant” to the idea of drawing up what would later become the Northern Ireland Museums Policy.
“There was quite a bit of tension between [the museum sector] and the department,” says the professional.
After some internal wrangling, the plan was given the green light by a subsequent culture minister, Nelson McCausland.
But even after that, the sector got an early
taste of the kind of unwelcome political meddling that can come from moving closer to government, after McCausland infamously urged museums to give more recognition to creationism in their displays.
Chris Bailey is the director of the Northern Ireland Museums Council (NIMC), the arm’s length body for museums that, together with National Museums Northern Ireland, was the driving force behind the strategy and is now charged with delivering it.
“It was a long, drawn out process, to the extent that it was only relatively recently that [the government] said ‘here’s the implementation plan’,” he says. “But that hasn’t stopped us from cracking ahead with it.”
The policy is structured around four pillars: collections management, use and care; audiences; education and learning; and infrastructure and resources.
The NIMC has based its business plans on those objectives and will allocate grants accordingly, but the council’s ability to move the policy forward is impeded by cuts to its own budget and funding reductions across the sector.
“We’ll deliver on policy but there are no new resources and budgets have diminished,” says Bailey. “The challenges of having less money do call into question the appropriateness of some of the goals – for example, increasing visitors to museums. One must be pragmatic.
“We only get a drop in the bucket so to expect us to deliver across all of those [goals] might be ambitious. We’ll focus on where we have the greatest effect or the greatest need.”
Adding to the upheaval is the fact that the local government in Northern Ireland is undergoing a significant restructure. “The policy has a 10-year horizon so we’ve got to take a long view on this,” says Bailey.
Scottish delays
The Scottish museum sector’s development of a national strategy has not been without its own bumps in the road.
When the final document, Going Further, came out a year ago, it was generally well received – though it met with some criticism for being too anodyne and broad.
However, the restructuring of Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS), which is transforming from a membership organisation to a strategic development body and has been given £3.3m to deliver the strategy over the next three years, has come in for more censure.
Objections over MGS’s new internally-appointed board and its subscription model, which – unlike similar bodies in the other nations – requires museums to pay to access services, have been partly responsible for pushing back the publication of the strategy’s delivery plan. For its part, MGS says the subscription model is the only sustainable option in a tough funding climate.
This delay has led to some disquiet within the sector. “It’s very disappointing that it will not feature in our forward planning for 2013-14,” says one museum director.
“Everybody is still very positive and keen to get started. But when you look at Wales, which has been very coordinated, I’m embarrassed we haven’t got our act together.”
The delivery plan will be released as soon as it has been approved by the new MGS board. But Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland, thinks the delay shouldn’t hold museums back from making use of the strategy document. NMS has already integrated it into its own planning, he says.
“As soon as the strategy was announced, expectations were raised, but it was always more likely to take some time to get going,” adds Rintoul.
MGS has launched or redesigned a number of investment streams to align with the strategy’s aims, including a strategic investment fund, a skills development fund and a new gateway fund to improve standards at museums that are not yet Accredited.
A detailed report based on the organisation’s consultation with the sector last year over the delivery plan is also imminent. Joanne Orr, the chief executive of MGS, says the data will be used to establish a baseline showing what resources will be needed to deliver the strategy.
The research was also vital for highlighting gaps in areas such as leadership and entrepreneurial skills that can now be addressed, she adds.
And what about England’s national strategy? After an attempt to draft one in 2009, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has made little reference to the subject.
Most of those involved in the devolved nations’ strategies agree that the process would be more difficult in England’s much larger sector, with so many more nationals, funders and stakeholders vying for input. But in difficult times, it might be more important than ever for museums to become greater than the sum of their parts.
“Having a whole nation behind a single vision is amazing,” says Orr. “There’s an openness to working together that we haven’t seen for a long time.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
Around 160 publicly displayed collections, including 87 Accredited museums
Key priorities
- Museums for everyone
- A collection for the nation
- Working effectively
42 Accredited museums
Key priorities
- Quality, professionalism, creativity and innovation
- A shared and better future
- Partnership
- Sustainability
More than 340 museums and galleries, including over 260 Accredited institutions
Key priorities
- Maximise the potential of our collections and culture
- Strengthen connections between museums, people and places
- Empower a diverse workforce
- Forge a sustainable future
- Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation and ambition
- Develop a global perspective