New scientists: full transcript

Participants:

Jean Franczyk - head of learning, National Museum of Science and Industry

Martin Braund - senior lecturer in science education, Centre for Research and Innovation in Science Education, University of York

Honor Gay - head of learning, Natural History MuseumJanet Stott - education officer, Oxford University Museums

Emma Newall - science educator, Institute of Education

Nick Winterbotham - chief executive, Thinktank, Birmingham Science

MuseumCris Edgell - STEM project director, Nuffield Curriculum Centre


Museums Journal: What do museums and science centres do differently from traditional methods of science education?

Honor Gay: I'd say authenticity and the fact that we offer the possibility of encounters with real practising scientists. That's really important in terms of where the secondary curriculum now is, that we have galleries that are designed to provide inspiring educational experiences, that we have an abundance of real specimens that students can handle.

If you look at the resources that a school classroom would have - they might have a dog or a cat skull, whereas we offer dinosaur bones and meteorites, things that have come from outer space. The wealth and the uniqueness of what we offer is really astonishing, and we also have trained educators, who understand the difference between an informal learning setting, which museums and science centres are, and the school classroom.

Jean Franczyk: I think on top of the examples Honor gave of access to real objects and practising scientists, you also have this opportunity to experience real phenomena on a large scale that you simply can't replicate within a classroom.

Marin Braund: I think there's a chance for museums to show sequences of ideas how these phenomena fit in with a wider view of science and also maybe make connections to school-based learning as well, which are time-consuming to do and require a lot of resources in schools.

Nick Winterbotham: We're also an off-site hit. There's now an initiative called learning out of the classroom, which we are hearing a lot about and we hope there will be serious money behind, but there's no doubt that what we offer in museums and in science centres is something which is copper-bottomed learning outside the classroom.

Maybe the thing it offers too, certainly in regional museums, is an insight into people's own region - what it is that made their region special or what it is that made their region particular and singular. The national museums do a very significant job in terms of what nations manage to achieve and what that heritage is too usually in terms of a qualitative experience. It is interesting to note how many of the schools that come to us in Birmingham, for example, want to know what makes Birmingham different.

Jean Franczyk: The other bit of feedback that we often get from our booked educational visitors is about the environment itself, because it is different both in its structure, its design, everything about it says "this is not a normal day". What you are able to prompt are different reactions and different behaviours - often different positive behaviours - on the part of young people who, within the confines of the four-walled classroom, behave quite differently.

A typical bit of feedback that we would get is: "I'm so worried about young Joe. He's always difficult to manage, but boy was he focused, he was excited, he was keyed in", and it's because the style of presentation and to some extent the methods used are quite different from what would be allowed in a classroom, and I think that's a really important environmental difference. I think that there are different methods of engagement.

Janet Stott: We found that really successful facilitated museum sessions are much more successful than a classroom because, for children who are struggling, particularly those who have got lower literacy levels, I think that they find science harder in a classroom, partly because a lot of the concepts are quite abstract, the language is quite complex.

But, for example, yesterday we had a group of mixed-ability year-8 children and the teacher was saying that the kids who were answering all the questions were kids who can hardly read. But because we had objects, it was concrete, it was open-ended questions, they were really motivated by these unique objects. That class also had children who were at the top end of GCSE, even though they were in year 8. It's a very mixed school and we've got such a rich environment that for those kids there's masses to stimulate them. I think science in a classroom can be quite didactic and boring for that level. In the museum you've got the potential, just with objects and well-facilitated sessions, to really inspire a whole range.

Martin Braund: I think that's interesting, because I think that a lot of quality learning goes with the quality of the questions that are being asked, and a lot of research shows that in a science classroom in school the questions the teacher asks are very often closed, so the dialogue between the teacher and the learner is relatively low level in terms of high-level cognitive skills being displayed by the students.

I'd be interested to know what you think the best questions are that could be asked in museums, or is it the fact that in these places it enables a higher quality of questioning? There must be a bit of both in there, perhaps. It's the skills of the question and the designer, but also the nature of the place and the experience.

Cris Edgell: I would really disagree with what you say about teachers not being able to engage students in the classroom and engaging them with low-level questions, because they are highly skilled and I think they do very well. I would say that if you do that in museums, I think that's a great thing, and I think you have all the facilities and all the artefacts to make that a really engaging experience but I'm not sure it's to do with the actual questioning.

Honor Gay: One of the things that we try and do at the museum is not only to ask the questions but to generate them. So for us the sign of a successful interaction is that the learner is generating questions that perhaps we can't answer, but they will take those questions out on to a website or out into the real world and try and answer them for themselves.

Cris Edgell: I would like to think that a student coming into a museum is given a lot more freedom in terms of what will interest them and engage them. There's such a range of exciting things here. I would say that education is by its nature closed, if not the style of the teachers, but because the curriculum is quite tight and the expectations are quite channelled.

I would hope that a kid comes into a museum with a sense of wonder and leaves with an even greater sense of wonder, and I think a lot of that's to do with allowing the kids some freedom in terms of what actually interests them. I mean, I'm not overly familiar with many of the education programmes that you run in museums, but I would hope that it doesn't mirror too much the kind of closed, "We're doing light today, we've come here just to study light", and that students have the chance to be inquisitive and to explore their own interests.

Nick Winterbotham: What we offer, in museums and science centres, is a kind of object-based learning which has object literacy at its heart. In other words, it's not primarily a written formula. It's verbal, and it's something which for that reason tends to be slightly more open ended.

I think one of the reasons that teachers very often enthuse about coming to museums is because it changes attitudes towards their subject matter. The effective domain works far better than the cognitive. All of a sudden what you've got is something that really is pivotal for the child.

They remember it long after they've forgotten what the lesson was - they remember going to the museum. It isn't just because they're having a day out and they've had nice sandwiches and they didn't throw up on the coach. It's because they remember it for the holistic experience that it is.

It's partly also because the people who work in museums are subject specialists and they may well have given that lesson 37 times. There's no doubt that by the time you get to 37 you really know how to teach something. You're no longer doing the one-off hit on that subject that a teacher might try to do and not be able to have those things at their fingertips. Inevitably it's going to be a different sort of a teaching experience.

The focus on enquiry that you were describing, I think, is dead right. Once you can start just simply offering questions and are no longer bound by the curriculum, even though the curriculum might have been the excuse for coming to the museum in the first place, it no longer requires you to tick particular boxes within the framework of the curriculum; you can do that enquiry thing and it stays open, and you end up with the wonder you're describing.

The youngsters say, "Well, it was a great lesson. We didn't have to write anything". There were none of the normal closures that schools insist upon. That in itself tends to lead to a different sort of experience, I think.

Marin Braund: I think the important thing here is does this experience actually make the connections between the learners and the experience they've had in the museum to then go back and want to find out more. If it can do that, then it might actually make them go back to school and want to do more there.

School science is often criticised for the fact it doesn't engage enough young people to go back and want to do more of it. Now, if we measured science centres and museums and galleries on the same basis, they would be more successful because they do engage people to want to go back and find out more.

Nick Winterbotham: We've done quite a lot of work with teachers on that issue, and one physics teacher sticks out. He said that after the visit to the science museum that never again did he have to answer the question, "Why are we doing physics?" It was, "Oh, okay. It's about engineering, it's about maths, it's about the development of things and so on", so in other words it moved his whole class on to a different level.

It doesn't answer the question of did they then want to go back and work out why steam was so significant or what actually is steam, but what it did do is it underpinned the very nature of the classroom experience.

Emma Newall: I was wondering if there had been any work done on how sustained that effect is. I think it's well known that it does enthuse and inspire students, but how long does that effect last once they get back in the classroom, and is there anything that museums can do to prolong that experience for them?

Martin Braund: There was some work done way back in the seventies on science museums in John Stevenson's work where he actually interviewed school groups and family groups. He followed them up for six months.

Now, normally in educational research, if you get long-lasting memories of experience and even some science after about two weeks, you'd be very pleased, but to go back and actually get some significant memories not just about going to the science museum and having a good time but actually some of the scientific principles that were underlying the exhibits, I thought was quite remarkable. Now, whether much work has been done since then…


Nick Winterbotham: I think the answer is no, it hasn't. On the other side of the Atlantic there's been rather more. It's been about what the impact is, how you can sustain it, what actually leads to the sustaining of these things, and quite often it's the relationship with the teacher that really matters.

Are they going to go again, is the big question; in this country, generally not. But that is one way of doing it. Another, of course, is to remember that a lot of family visits are driven by the school experience, so while the school experience is the most democratic thing we do, because it brings to you the whole spectrum of society, you'll find a lot of children then say, "Can we go?"

Jean Franczyk: One of the things I was thinking about was the importance of a family visit and how it enhances or complements what might be happening in a school classroom or a school visit to a museum. I don't know what comes first, the young person that comes with the school visit or the family visit. But I do know, because we will see a ratio quite different of adults to children in family groups, that the potential for learning and interaction between adult and child is more significant in a 1:2 or 1:3 type group that a family group represents.

You tend to have a greater reinforcement of the learning that might make that child think more positively about the science they encounter in school. I think that can't be underestimated.

The other thing is that we have - although we don't have any longitudinal studies to reinforce this notion of memorability - we do get lots of evidence that the experience made an impression, and Launchpad is a great example. We get thousands and thousands of letters and drawings that are sometimes left in galleries, sometimes that are sent in later that reinforce this notion. One of my favourite stories is the parent who sent in a letter saying: "My kid had a great time, I have no idea what was going on but I know they had fun.

I don't know if they learned anything but a couple of weeks later Dad was trying to move something and couldn't do it and Susie said, 'You need one of those round things with a string on it that does this - like we saw in Launchpad' describing a pulley." So there are lots of things that we get that indicate there is something that's happened there, that there is a memory and a recall and hopefully a prompt to investigate further, whether it's in sciences or some other area.

Honor Gay: It's interesting though, isn't it, that there's been one study in the seventies, and then beyond that we're looking at anecdotes. I think that that's quite an indictment of us. I think it's very easy for kids and teachers to be enormously inspired and enthused by coming out of the classroom, having a high-quality experience.

The kind of feedback that we tend to do a lot of is end of session feedback, and it's unbelievably brilliant. But one of the things that we're doing at the Natural History Museum is we've just got a partnership with Kings College to look at the longer-term impact of our A-level programme because we want to affect career choices.

We would love to show that we can affect attainment. And so we're working with a PhD student who is going to try and track the much longer-term impact, and I'm surprised that we don't do that more as a sector because we really do need to be able to demonstrate longer-term impact.

Nick Winterbotham: I think we do. I think you shouldn't overlook the impact of Inspiring Learning For All. Because you cannot get an HLF grant nowadays without having a proper learning strategy, which would include the General Learning Outcomes, which are all about the ways in which people learn.

Museums Journal: But that is different to proving impact, isn't it?

Honor Gay: Learning outcomes are brilliant in that a lone education officer in a small museum with no funding can use them, but actually they do predispose the answer, yes, and as such I think they're of one of a range of tools we need to use to show impact, but actually we wouldn't be putting it on a secretary of state's desk, would we, a learning outcomes evaluation?

Martin Braund: I think there's a move generally in education towards impact studies which show sizes of effects, and there's a move in terms of evidence-based practice. I'm not suggesting the sector goes down that road, but they tend to be the kind of studies that ministers look at. They tend to be the ones that policy makers are looking towards. But it's interesting that they don't have anything on the informal learning museum sector agenda as part of their studies. It's about mathematics in primary school, it's about literacy and so on, but there are opportunities in there.

Honor Gay: That said, I do think that informal science education has got a vastly better evidence base and links with research than humanities in museums, and I think when Jean and I find ourselves in a forum with non-science museum peers we find that the whole rigour of practice that we have from being involved in formal science education is substantially more than, say, history or citizenship or other areas.

Emma Newall: With a science learning centre that's the way things are going in terms of evaluation and it has to involve working with the teacher in the planning stage of their professional development before they actually come on a course as well as the course evaluation and then the impact in the classroom. They have to demonstrate how they have used it. I was wondering if there was something that the museums could take away from that as well.

Cris Edgell: In terms of what you want the children to take away we've talked about the desire to learn more. Is there a mechanism that joins up their experience at the moment to what they might do afterwards in school? Are they invited to visit a website? Are they invited to join a kind of e-community? Are there those sorts of things in place that are a step to joining it up?

Honor Gay: I think it's really quite challenging. We're a national museum and we get over 100,000 school visits a year, so we develop a big programme on site which is open to any school that books, and for non-visiting schools we might try and contact them in a different way. In terms of then being able to identify those schools that come and follow up with some kind of other experience; that's a really interesting question about where do our resources go.

Do they go into something that any school can access? Or do we deepen the experience for the few? I think currently we tend to be more about providing a wider range of activities that anyone can access and I think it's really hard to do those deeper experiences without getting additional funding.

Cris Edgell: I'm not suggesting that it should be your priority, but if you really do want to see sustainability and impact, the only way to do it is to have some mechanism to join it up.

Jean Franczyk: One of the things that it is important is to understand is that museums, as informal learning communities, are complementary to and never, ever, ever a replacement for a formal school environment.

There's no way we have the capacity to deliver on the remit of a formal education system, nor should we try, because we would fail at that. We talk about the mission that we have as a learning unit within our family of museums as that we want to inspire, engage and motivate learning.

We don't talk about teaching. We know that we get people for a relatively brief period of time and I think we'd be wildly successful if we are prompting curiosity that lasts a day, a week, a month - if we're really good, a lifetime. They're going to come back again and again to places like us. Or to be in the outside world and kind of move through that space always as a learner - that's what success looks like.

The other thing is this notion somebody mentioned earlier of sustaining relationships, and we take the opportunity when we succeed in getting sponsorship money to invest significantly in building a relationship with a school, usually through our outreach programmes, and we go back many times and interact with that community of learners.

We work with the teachers before we go. We work with the students while we're there. We bring them back to the museum. We go back again. But we can't do that with every visit. We get more than 300,000 booked education visits a year. There's no way we're giving those groups a kind of one-on-one intensity of experience. But that's not to say that there isn't huge value added in the experience that they have within our museums.

Museums Journal: Is the experience different outside of London in terms of following through on those visits?

Nick Winterbotham: I think it's patchy. We've been operating for six years, and in that time we've got to 70,000 schoolchildren a year, which is a lot for a regional museum, and some of that is outreach, so we know quite well what it is that they want. The strength of Thinktank is that it's very focused on exactly what teachers want and that was the whole purpose of setting the thing up in the first place. It wasn't a pre-existing world where all of a sudden we thought we might make it an add-on; it's actually a core part of what we do.

In terms of sustainability, at its most basic, it's about trying to make sure that the schools that have been come again. So you could see it as a marketing proposition rather than anything else.

There's been a thing called science cities, where there's been a real effort to join up the economics of a city - in our case Birmingham - with the notion that we can inspire people to make scientific choices in what happens afterwards, whether they are going to be scientists, which is rare, or involved in a business which has science at its heart. So in other words we're looking at an economic drive to prove that we turn children, particularly teenagers, into something that might be at least pro-science, something that's going to be supportive of it.

Janet Stott: As a smaller regional museum with a very small staff indeed; we are in this perhaps more fortunate situation that we can hold relationships. We know who our schools are; we've got some schools that will travel two hours to get to us, but the schools that we really concentrate on, in Oxfordshire, we do have relationships with.

We do outreach to schools so we do have sustained relationships, and it also extends to the teacher training as well, and we often find the same teachers are mentors for PGCE students and we've got relationships with their mentors, so in terms of visits and collaboration, that can work very well. I think the smaller museums may have an easier role in terms of sustainability and in terms of knowing the schools.

Martin Braund: There are also the science specialist schools but you've also got the business and enterprise colleges which have just come on stream in the last year or so, so to make those part of the network of learning would be useful to you. I don't know if any work has been done on that.

Emma Newall: Referring to what you were saying about teacher training, this is something that I am particularly interested in, because one thing that I think has been overlooked is the power to enthuse teachers, not just their students. I think there are an awful lot of learning opportunities for teachers in a museum, in two different ways.

In terms of their own skills about using objects and using galleries for learning outside the classroom and in the different ways of teaching what that requires. But also, I think, for teachers bringing older age groups there to give the A-level days the Natural History Museum offers, they actually learn an awful lot from that experience of seeing science done in its real context as well, the learning about the collections and the work of the museum.

Museums Journal: Can schools and colleges learn anything from museums and science centres in terms of practice?

Nick Winterbotham: I was engaged in doing my own research for a while, which eventually turned into a doctorate in which I talked to 440 teachers in different parts of the country. One of the questions was what service did they want from the museum, and 29 per cent wanted information and background.

About half that number were interested in having direct contact with a museum person when they actually got there. So in other words, there wasn't a huge enthusiasm for necessarily having their class taken over, but they wanted to nonetheless have that service. Only 3 per cent wanted teacher training.

Emma Newall: I think that it might be because they're not aware that that is something that we could offer or that they may need.
Cris Edgell: One of the things they might get from it might be how to teach off site, because that often isn't taught in initial training.

So, in other words, the notion of getting very good in the classroom is certainly there but how you actually teach off site, what this is when you don't have a blackboard and not going to make it such a verbally led experience and so on, I think is something they could definitely learn from museums. But as you say, they don't know it's either on offer or that there might be some benefit from it.

Emma Newall: And there are funding implications for that as well, because I know from the work I've done here at the Natural History Museum, there is a large uptake for beginning teachers, for teachers in training, we get a lot of groups wanting to come, but what we offer for qualified teachers who work in school, there is a course for learning outside the classroom, but it has no uptake.

Nick Winterbotham: What would you say were the sort of key elements or skills that such a course would deliver?

Emma Newall: Part of it is quite prosaic stuff, so like literally how do you plan your day, how do you structure it, how many adults do you need to help you, how are you going to get there, how do you do risk assessment; but we also offer sessions on learning with objects, how to get the best out of learning from objects; how to then go out into a gallery and plan how you are going to use just a small section of it.

Also there is big emphasis on making it have greatest impact by working with the students before you come and when you get back, after your visit, you know, to sustain what they have learnt, to help develop the themes and integrate it into the curriculum teaching.
Janet Stott: Just to go back to what we can offer teachers. It seems to me that the new curriculum offers a fantastic opportunity for us.

It's about how science works, and what real science is about. What real science is about is evidence, and that's what we've got; and certainly when I was a classroom science teacher I don't think I did teach with an awful lot of evidence, because I was desperately trying to keep to the curriculum, and I think museums have got wonderful opportunity in terms of what we do, but also in terms of what could be done in classrooms, to go back and say, "Look, here's the evidence".

We set up a situation with an archaeopteryx and say, "What can you see?" and they are saying, "Well, it's got brittle bones". You say, "But what can you see, what's the evidence?" and they go, "Well, the bones are broken".

And from evidence we are coming to ideas. I think science teachers could get really excited about this and we're lucky because in museums we've got wonderful unique objects, but there are objects in the classroom that could be used like this, and it's a while ago I was a science teacher but it's not how I was taught to teach science. But with the new curriculum I just think we've got real opportunities we ought to grab.

Nick Winterbotham: Yes. At the heart of it it's about skills, isn't it, because what you're effectively imparting is the democratic right to question things. We're not trying to create factory fodder here, we're trying to convince people science is there to give you an enquiring mind, it enables you to make your choices about the future of your own family, of your world or whatever it is. It has to be about that, it can't just be about trying to make sure people are electricians by the time they are age 11.

Jean Franczyk: That's right. The most important thing is the foundation of the question. We talked about questions a lot here, and the philosophical approach that we take is to value the question almost above all else; and many, many teachers, because of that confinement over the years to the curriculum, are not comfortable with questions, especially questions that they can't answer.

One of the programmes that we have designed for teachers at key stage 4 is called Talk Science, and it takes the work that the Science Museum has done in the Dana Centre, which is all about contemporary science dialogue and debate, and we've worked with those teachers to help them become comfortable in facilitating that kind of debate and dialogue in their classroom. The feedback consistently is: "I'm really nervous about this; I don't know how to manage the question; what do I do with the question I don't know how to answer?"

You can see that that is one of the things I think museums can bring to teachers, is getting comfortable with the questions, understanding the value, the learning value that's attached to that approach, and then allowing them to practise it in a way that they might not have been practising before, or at least increase their level of comfort with it.

Martin Braund: I think there is a role here for museums to encourage and model good discourse between pupils and between scientists about evidence. Because one of the things we've found - and we did a review of the international research on this - was about effective group work in science.

It was quite hard to find very much, although some people claim that effective group work was pairs of pupils collaborating on a computer program, but we're really talking about groups being able to debate and argue about significant scientific issues, and this is becoming more and more prevalent now. So if these places can actually help in this modelling of what is good argument and what is good discourse about science, I think that would be very helpful.

Going back also to the point about ideas and evidence. I think schools are really struggling for good examples, so if the museum sector can perhaps encourage schools to make use of this resource and plan it in, it would be terribly useful.

Cris Edgell: Coming back to what might be useful skills to offer teachers that are interested in coming to museums, I think it would be good to take some training that teaches them to deal with artefacts in a museum situation - to develop that into a durable skill that they can then take back into the classroom, so it becomes part and parcel of the fabric that they're teaching, that they understand how to use objects and artefacts as ways into lessons or as ways of developing lessons.

I think that some teachers do well, some don't; but I think beyond that, it's really interesting if some of the museology was to go home with teachers as well, in terms of why are these objects selected, what's the meaning of these objects, why are these objects collected here, why have we selected these objects to show you, and then develop that also in terms of teaching to let students also put meaning to objects and maybe even develop their own sorts of collection. I think that would be a really interesting thing for students to do, to actually understand why artefacts are gathered together, collected, the meanings associated with them, and give students the opportunity to develop their own meanings and their own collections, might be interesting.

Nick Winterbotham: Well, I think it's a lovely notion. I think the difficulty comes if you start saying your visit is really about understanding what a museum is. Sure, a museum is a place you might want to go and might want to enjoy doing things but do you actually really want them to understand that it's part of the greater fabric of society? I'm not sure if you really do. I think we have to be a bit careful when offering a philosophical framework like that.

Cris Edgell: It's maybe not philosophical, because if you've got all these kids in here they would make their own sense of what's here, they would collect their own objects wouldn't they?

Nick Winterbotham: I've worked in a number of different environments with teachers, sometimes science ones but also in art galleries, and the big worry with an art gallery was is it meant to be a cathedral to silence? Are you actually meant to just contemplate and be inspired? "Hell no", is the reply, but they didn't know that. So at the end of the day, how much would they actually let them off the leash to start using the eyes that you've just given them in terms of what they could see and what they could explore. I think that's probably when we really should help more, because we could definitely offer that as a different way of thinking about their environment.

Honor Gay: I think it's quite important. Museums are all about objects, and everyone knows museums are all about objects, but for me, museums are just as much about expertise as they are about objects. I think that unless the objects are mediated by knowledge.

We offer the opportunity for encounters with practising scientists who have got to do science, and in the context of where the science curriculum is going, I would say that is probably a more unique advantage than it is to have 70 million objects. It happens in two contexts. It happens in terms of are scientists being interviewed about their research and having the opportunity for dialogue with an A-level class. So that happens in a public gallery, and that's a programme that we also do for families and adults.

But also, the students get to go behind the scenes, they get to see where the scientists work and they get to see the scientists in their habitat, if you like, and an opportunity to talk to a scientist. And that is partly about the science that they do, but it's also partly about them as a person, how they got into science, what motivates them and is a part of their job.

We know that that is quite an overwhelming and a very motivating experience. The stereotype of the scientist is so powerful. Every time you ask anyone to draw a scientist, it's hard to get away from the beard, the sandals, the lab coat with the pens, and I think transforming that stereotype to people like us do science from, you know, you have to be a bit weird to do science, is really important, and I think it can't be over estimated in the context of what museums can offer.

Jean Franczyk: I would say that the engagement that we provide on the floor is from people who I will call science communicators, and there are excellent science communicators. They are not going to be practising scientists the way the Natural History Museum has practising scientists.

The other point I wanted to respond to was yours, Cris, where you talked about curating - could you inspire someone to develop their own collection. There are lots of ways to reflect on the experience of the museum, the objects within it, the science that's studied there, including creating your own representation of the work, of the experience you've just had.

We have used films to do that, so that you get these young people creating an impression of their experience that they then share with each other, and so you have this product at the end of an encounter with us. In that case I'm talking about, it was an energy outreach project that we did, but the vehicle to get them engaged in the science was that ultimately they made a film that they then saw on that big Imax screen next door.

There were several hundred kids on this big theatre; it was like the Oscars in there; it was their piece of work that they then could share with colleagues and friends. So it's not the same type of thing as "I'm going to go back and emphasise collecting …"

Cris Edgell: Yes. But it is making meaning of the experience.

Jean Franczyk: It's making meaning of the experience, and that of course is what learning is.

Emma Newall: The Science Learning Centre does offer exactly that in the session on learning through objects, not just subjects in a museum, it is supposed to be about also how that can be used back in the classroom and how you can generate your own collections as a class.

The Science Learning Centre is undergoing quite a few changes at the moment, and from April a new programme is going to be offered, and I know that one of the core themes is learning outside the classroom. So I will be pushing this kind of workshop to be included.

Jean Franczyk: There's this fabulous chart that comes out of the Centre for Life at the University of Washington in Washington State. I call it the swimming pool diagram because it's the sea of blue, and in the middle is this bit of orange that represents how much time we spend in formal learning environments, and in your waking hours, you're likely to be spending 15 per cent of your time in a formal learning environment.

The bulk of course is in those primary/secondary school years, and then it tapers off. Then whether it's getting from our homes to our tube station or walking inside one of these places, those are all these learning experiences.

The learning outside the classroom agenda is quite broad and one of the things that I would hope that can happen is a recognition of the role the informal sector plays in reinforcing learning. I think that that's still something that is at the edge of a conversation as opposed to in the middle of the conversation.

Museums Journal: What about the national curriculum - how much does it influence subject matter and learning in museums?

Nick Winterbotham: Can I give a slightly controversial take on that? I surveyed teachers in 1988, 1993 and 2001. In 1988 nobody even mentioned the word national curriculum; 1993 was the year when it was implemented, and 2001 was when they were beginning to rethink it.

And what really emerged was in 1993, when the last question of my questionnaire to teachers was "What impact has the national curriculum had?", and you almost got abuse back. Generally speaking; "None" or "Would it ever?" or "Do we need this?" It was as if the teachers had lost the initiative, they had already been told what to do, and they were straight-jacketed into stuff that they didn't find particularly useful.

In 2001 they were saying something rather similar, but what they were also saying was they were using it as a tool. The tool, depending on who they were facing, was, if it was towards the headteacher it was, "But don't you see, head teacher, this is how we fit into the QCA guidelines." (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority). If they were facing parents, the letters would say, "This will meet these particular parts of the national curriculum, that's why we are asking you to give money to enable the museum visit to happen."

In other words, you could say the national curriculum has broken over us like a wave during that time, but it hasn't really changed what it is that teachers look for in a museum visit, which is this business of inspiring, looking at, enquiry and all the rest of it.

HONOR GAY: I think if we're talking about secondary science the curriculum is so tailored to what we are excellent about. I think prior to the changes in 2006, the very heavy content prescription meant that it wasn't quite as fitted, but now, it's all about how science works in the real world and the context within which scientists practise, and that is a gift to us.

What's happened is the national curriculum, at key stage 4 and 5 and now at key stage 3, has really moved, so that actually teachers need what a natural history museum or a science museum has to offer in order to really demonstrate what is at the core of the curriculum.

We're really hoping that we will become viewed as key to delivering the secondary curriculum. Any museum is underpinned by science. Conservation is all about science, and I think this is a golden opportunity for the sector, because let's face it science education goes to a far more senior level in government than humanities education; and I think the museum sector should be right in there.

Natural history museums can do it, science museums can do it, every museum should be doing it.

Jean Franczyk: One of the most significant things to remind ourselves of is that the largest learning product that we as museums offer are exhibitions, and at the science museum in a typical year your booked school visits range from 12 per cent to 15 per cent of your entire audience so those exhibitions have to cater to quite a broad array of the general public. We like to say that we are informed, not led, by the national curriculum.

And what we consistently know from all of the research and evaluation we've done on both the learning product that goes to book school groups or to the exhibitions themselves is that what people want is both fun and educational, and teachers in particular tell us again and again and again they want us to be fun and educational and different from school. They don't want us to be the same.

So I think we can fulfil this requirement but also be true to our own USP, which is to present this information in a very different kind of way and therefore draw people into a very exciting, engaging and curiosity prompting experience. That's where our strength lies.

I think that if the science museum had created Launch Pad - which supports the curriculum wholeheartedly, but if they had created it like a textbook approach the gallery would be empty, instead of heaving with both school booked visitors as well as family visitors.
Cris Edgell: Like you, I'm really optimistic about the national curriculum, it's like Christmas came early. It could have a really liberating effect in schools and with teachers and I think it could be great for museums as well.

But I think it's really important that the early opportunity to actually demonstrate the use of museums and other out of school activities has to be done fairly swiftly, otherwise teachers will revert to type, and some schools were beginning to close down their curriculum, teach fast, teach key stage 3 in two years rather than in three, go to GCSEs real fast, and all of that opportunity would be lost. But I think it falls very neatly, the curriculum supports the work you do, I just think you need to keep your eye on it, and I'm particularly interested in the kind of skills rather than the knowledge base here.

They're looking for independent enquirers, creative thinkers, teamwork, teamwork as self managers, effective participators. I think you should bear that in mind when you're thinking about what you're going to do with kids when they come here. But in terms of the concept base, I think the pressure is off in a sense, I think it's a good thing.

Martin Braund: Can I just pick up one point there? You mentioned the skill side of things, and there was some research work done after the national curriculum had been in about three or four years, and the actual variety of practical work that's been going on, particularly at key stage 4, has got less and less, and the whole intention of the national curriculum was to open up investigative work and pupils are encouraged to display a variety of skills.

Actually, in effect what happened was, because the subject specification just got narrower and narrower you almost got the sort of specified three experiments being done at 14 to 16, and I think these places of informal learning have such a wide variety of examples of not just hands-on experimentation but all sorts of enquiries, chances to enhance observation, prediction and hypothesising, linking between one area of science and another, that there's a lot of opportunities in there, and I think that skill side could be really solid.

And I agree with Cris that the real emphasis now in the next year or so, and I think it's pretty urgent, is to really do a big marketing job on what the sector can offer, in the widest possible way. The how science works thing is really big, but I think Cris has begun to touch on this idea of widening out the number of skills that we can persuade teachers can be addressed here.

Honor Gay: We obviously knew that the curriculum was going to change, so we did an active workshop called How Science Works, a practical workshop. What that does is that takes real research done by our micropaleontologists, where they extract micro fossils from mud, and we've adapted that piece of research so that the key stage 4 class can do that; and it comes back to the value of the authenticity that we can offer, because the comment we get afterwards was: "We like it so much that this is a real piece of research that we have done and not something that's just been developed for a school experiment."

So we've used our USP, but we've also really made sure it hits those curriculum buttons.

Martin Braund: One of the first things you said in this roundtable was about authentic science, and I think that's a really good example of where the science is much more authentic because scientists don't work in these little compartments, as school experiments often do.

I think this part of science is a collaborative approach that involves creative collaborative thinking, talking to other people, and its multi-disciplinary as well and I think there are lots of opportunities. You were talking about conservation issues in art collections, for example, and I think that's a good example working with material scientists working with artists and so on, and art history, so that there's a much more multi-discovery.

Honor Gay: I do feel really evangelical that museums are missing a trick when it comes to science, and I think with secondary science is the ultimate challenge. We've found there's a barrier to museums engaging in science unless it's their core remit, but also secondary school students are perceived as the more difficult, the more challenging. Educators feel less confident around it.

But I think here at the Science Museum there's really great examples of engaging and complementing the classroom; really supporting pupils' learning and increasing their aspirations and I really feel that more museums should take the plunge because it brings so much organisational kudos. Our organisation uses it so much for advocacy. Science education gets you into a different line of opinion formers than objects, conservation or the more traditional areas.

Nick Winterbotham: One of the things that we found in talking to people in Birmingham was that science is a problematical word and also that we underestimate children. There are areas in which children are far more gifted with using scientific principles or even scientific machines - I think of computers and mobile phones in particular - than their teachers are so that you are already talking about a cohort of children who are much more engaged in the technological world than maybe their parents and certainly their grandparents are. So there is a level that we are actually ignoring what is already happening behind the scenes.

What we have also found in Birmingham is that there is a huge aspiration particularly among certain parts of the community for their children to engage with science. There are Asian girls who are under pressure to become dentists and doctors and engage themselves in what are clearly scientific careers at a high level, and have difficulty in managing to do that given the nature of the education that they are getting and have looked to us to provide the wherewithal to understand science better. So it may well be that we are missing things in the science, technology, engineering, maths agenda that we are being asked to look at.

Much more significant than that though, I think the STEM agenda itself is being fudged. It falls between at least three government departments, probably more. It is horribly under funded. We are falling over ourselves to demonstrate our credentials in this area and we we're not even after money any more.

We're just after some degree of credibility if we're not going to be overtaken by Portugal, Germany, India and China - I just mention four countries who have all declared this to be an agenda they are going to fund properly and create science centres. If you're not going to fall behind those we're going to have to do something more than just be talking to the minister of science who declares himself in favour of all those things and has no money to do anything.

Museums Journal: What do you say to the museums that don't naturally fall into the category of museums that do science education?

Honor Gay: As part of our partnership project we looked to see how many museums had natural history collections; 350 of them do and even if you've only got stuffed rabbits and a mangy old lion skin, you can still engage secondary science students. What I would say is that there is the expertise in national and regional museums, and certainly on the natural history side we really want to build the confidence and the expertise to be able to engage with local secondary schools and science students. So I'd say it's not as hard as you think, you can do it and it brings real rewards.

Jean Franczyk: I'm head of learning for the Science Museum, the National Railway Museum and the Media Museum. Those are three very different organisations. However, the techniques that the Media Museum uses and the tools they are using to engage young people in media I can use to engage young people in science, and we're working to make sure that we're sharing those practices across our museums.

You know the Railway Museum up in York has an incredible representation of engineering as well as telling the stories, the social history and the cultural stories, that the collection up there represents. So I think there are more ways than there are fewer for everybody to engage and I'm also familiar with some really interesting projects that have been done - not on this side of the pond but on the other - where the Science Museum and the Art Museum can work together to talk specifically about conservation techniques and the chemistry that goes into supporting that Art Museum and it's reinforcing the Science Museum so there are all kinds of ways to do this. This is not a conversation unique to these museums represented here.

Janet Stott: And I think particularly museums can - of almost whatever type - can facilitate students interacting with scientists so whether they are conservators or as a university museum it is obviously fairly easy for us to get hold of scientists. But actually most museums can be fantastic meeting places between scientists and students.

Scientists often do need skill development and as museums we can often do that facilitating and I think that is a real opportunity particularly with sixth-form groups in terms of sixth-form study days where they have a programme of lectures from scientists, from academics; they go behind the scenes, they talk to them about their work but it can be done with much younger students as well but you don't need to be in a university to do that. I think it's a real opportunity.

Honor Gay: I've had more opportunity to reflect on your question and I suppose the biggest thing I would say is science is part of culture. The cultural offer doesn't even mention the word science. It's really for the museum sector to be accepting --

Nick Winterbotham: It's truly scandalous.

Honor Gay: -- science as part of what every museum does because science is a way of looking at the world that we all do all the time. It's about observation, evidence, hypothesis. We all act in a scientific way.
Nick Winterbotham: There's a lot of people downstairs right now who would buy into that without really thinking about it. The numbers of people who visit national museums from overseas do so because this is where this particular science was invented. This is where the steam train came from or whatever else.

The other thing that is quite interesting too, especially about this museum, was there was a time I came back here at least four times in the last five years and encountered a film crew and they were often using the main hall and one of them was a programme about dinosaurs made for school television.

Another one was a feature film which was nothing to do with the science but used the setting of a science museum because it conferred a kind of grandeur, a cultural value that you couldn't otherwise get from anywhere else. Now, to have that going on as a sort of a backdrop in what we do, it seems that the media have cottoned on to this idea even if those who make strategy about culture haven't.

Honor Gay: If you look at Darwin there's the science of natural selection and it is ever so simple. It's not controversial although there are scientific controversies about exactly how it happened. It's when you get to the social and the cultural impact, when you start thinking about faith and race and eugenics. Actually the science isn't complicated; it's the impact and the legacy of that science. It's a very interesting organisational journey for the Natural History Museum and there is no doubt that the science is our comfort zone. But actually after a lot of internal discussions and thinking about "can we do this, what about the risks", we are going to talk about the impact of the theory on society. The work we did on slavery is a really good springboard for dealing with a dangerous, sensitive issue.

Jean Franczyk: There are two things that come to mind. The Science Museum, I think, is quite innovative and bold when it comes to addressing contemporary science issues that absolutely place science at the heart of the cultural framework in which we all live and breathe. One of them, of course, is through the Science Museum's Dana Centre. The other is through the art installation projects.

We have a stunning piece now, Listening Posts, which is based on real-time internet chat which is quite scary and it's this partnership between a statistician and a visual artist but it is inside the science museum. We also know from our course for Key Stage 4 teachers, the Talk Science course, that among the feedback we get from them is: "God, it shouldn't just be science teachers you are delivering this to, you should be delivering to all of the teachers within the year group because the value added is there for all of us."

So I couldn't agree more with Honor's statement that science is culture. It is so much a part of it but whenever I see the word there's almost a parenthetical or an absolute follow on that says it is only the arts and I just - I can't - I don't get it.

Nick Wintebotham: And if you're talking about public engagement, which we always are nowadays with science, it's key to how we do it. It's key to our recognition whether it's the science or anything else, but with public engagement you can get such rewarding results and one we've had in Birmingham in the time we've been opened is we discovered that people wanted - because we talk to the public all the time - we discovered they wanted to have a planetarium so we provided them with a planetarium.

We now have Britain's second newest planetarium and what was lovely about this was, first of all, many people wanted it. Secondly, they came in huge numbers to see it and, thirdly - and this made me think we are often overlooking science - it's mind bogglingly beautiful.

You sit there and you observe the universe from the comfort of a nice reclining chair; so comfortable that you have to limit shows to 20 minutes otherwise people actually fall asleep while they are dreaming their way around the universe. Science itself often presents you with fabulous, fabulous opportunities.

When I was at the Railway Museum we noticed that visits were often driven by an individual, a child that came in a class or someone who's interested in steam trains or whatever it was, and the family impact of the Railway Museum was actually about generations. It was about relationships between grandma and grandpa they suddenly unearthed in front of the family.

It was about the understanding of this mega engineering which is just so extraordinary and so weird it had an emotional impact that really carried on, I believe, for life. People will remember those visits long after. When they left it was: 'Who can we tell about this because this has been so good I want to go and tell somebody else about it?"

We often miss, I think, the real earthy impact that museums can have, particularly science museums and they have so much to offer; it's where we started authenticity and probably where we'll continue in terms of always providing them.

Honor Gay: I like the word "beautiful". I think evolution is beautiful. I think that science has an elegance and a sort of aesthetic quality around its processes that I actually think we just do not - the science education community - really celebrate or bring to the fore.

Museums Journal: But if museums and science centres are so good at doing all the things that we've talked about for the last hour or so, why is it the government doesn't fund them appropriately?
Nick Winterbotham: I think we are particularly badly funded but having said that we've got a government that doesn't really believe in spending any more than it absolutely has to.

Jean Franczyk: I think it's important to make the distinction between the science centres and science museums because national museums do get grants that are substantial.

Honor Gay: I think the problem is slightly different and I think we've worked very hard to put the value of out of classroom learning on to the science education community's agenda. For me, that has seemed like quite a struggle.

There are so many issues around science teaching, pupil's motivation and attainment but I think a lot of the focus has been on what happens in the classroom and it really feels is in all the money is going into the STEM agenda whereas the outside the classroom which is so inspirational, so transportive, is just off the side and all the focus is on teachers in the classroom. So I would say it's not government perhaps. I would say it's the science education community that perhaps doesn't recognise the contribution we can make.

Jean Franczyk: There's very little recognition. Very little recognition of the contribution the informal sector can make.

Martin Braund: I think this fits quite fundamentally and quite deeply into our society in this country in that we equate education with the school system, with schooling and really that graph that you referred to with the kind of orange bits and the sea of blue I remember now where I've seen it in an article by Jonathan Osborne in the School Science Review and that sort of makes me view that perhaps the government concentrates on that little orange bit because it thinks: "Well, that's the bit that we can control. That's what we can do something about and that's where the voters are at the end of the day". And the blue bit can just do what the hell it likes.

Jean Franczyk: And there is some evidence to suggest in the States that the most memorable experience is the family visit and think about why, right. The ratio is one adult to one kid, maybe to three. The opportunities for scaffolding and learning are greater, reinforcing the family stories, the intergenerational learning; very, very powerful experiences that have a positive effect on what we should call just the orange line and I just think, "God, am I missing that conversation here?"

Nick Winterbotham: Well, in this very institution McManus was doing that work back in the 1970s and came to the conclusion eventually that the family visit was about two or three times more potent in terms of its learning opportunity for both adult and child than a school visit was with all its peer group pressures and all the other things that actually make school visits problematical.

But the thing to remember I suppose is that of the roughly 9 million children that go to science museums and centres every year, only about a quarter of that, if you're lucky, are actually coming in the school party, probably less.

I think national museums may be slightly different from the general picture but it's -- but even so, let's not forget, out of 8 or 9 million children coming, admittedly some of those are going to be the same children going twice or to different institutions, but even so it's a huge whack of the nation's children that are benefiting from this and are getting some kind of input from what we do.

So we shouldn't underestimate the impact that we have and I think what often happens is - it's about voters. It's about voters and what can be controlled. It's a shame that not more notice is taken of what we do. Perhaps they just want to let us get on with it. You know, you don't need our help, you are so effective already.

Cris Edgell: It's exactly as you say, it's accountability culture. I mean that is what has sapped the energy of teachers. It's the national programme. In fact, that's probably why the national programme was invented in the first place; it's a chance for a government to actually measure attainment and compare it to how it was before and demonstrate improvements.

So, I think you're on a hiding to nothing really until that changes. On a more optimistic note, I would suggest that teaching and learning in schools will change. I think that kind of fits-in-four-walls in classes of 30 being taught by a teacher at the front by a confined constricted curriculum will change and I think that schools and the education system are bound to recognise learning from all different sorts of areas with the technologies that children themselves use.

I think that also will mean that there maybe an opportunity to recognise the kind of learning that happens informally outside as well. I don't think teachers are in a position to really hold on to that sort of key position in terms of holding kids down and controlling them and teaching them what they want anymore. I don't think it can happen in a society like this which is so fluid.

Janet Stott: But I thought also we are talking about secondary science and actually I don't think you get the large numbers of family groups visiting with this age group.

Jean Franczyk: You don't get large numbers of schools visiting with families at secondary level.

Janet Stott: No, but I think that we do need to keep pressing for funding for secondary science to work with schools because I think in terms of motivating the next generation of scientists, museums have got a big role to play and are fantastic for families. But actually from the point of view of my museum with our formal schools programme for secondary schools that that's probably the way those kids are going to come into the museum.

Jean Franczyk: Although the research certainly shows that young people are making decisions where they are keyed into what their career interests are at age 11 if it's science, and by 14 it's often too late and there's one longitudinal study from the States, a guy at the University of Virginia, that looked at people at the age of 30 who were in the sciences - physical, biological, engineering as well - and was trying to find the point at which they were choosing or pursuing a particular career path and they were making their choices as early as 11 and after 14 if somebody wasn't indicating that career interest, they weren't likely to make that kind of a choice, so you've got to get in there at a pretty young age.

At the secondary level we're getting significant numbers of key stage 3. The research we've done with the Key Stage 4 potential visitors, booked educational visitors, into our museums say the barriers are extremely high so they are not coming to us for any number of reasons that the Science Museum doesn't control - difficulty in getting the required number of adults to accompany the visits, the difficulty with the timetabling, all of those types of things that are theirs and not ours as a museum. We can't overcome those barriers for them.

Janet Stott: But with specific funding you can make those trips more likely to happen.

Jean Franczyk: You can but they - I don't think we should ignore those very real obstacles that those groups face.

Honor Gay: We've grown our secondary school visits and that's quite unusual for museums in that we're more or less 50/50 which is really unusual. We have this dual personality as a visitor attraction and a science institution, and I think because of that secondary science was always going to be a clear winner because in a way the health of our institution depends on there being a pool of scientists on whom we can draw for scientists to come and work here.

So, we used our strategic commissioning funding. Initially, Oxford had a secondary programme before we did. We learnt a lot and adapted from them. We grew the partnership. We've done a lot of teacher consultation. I completely agree that particularly with the curriculum change it is hard to get key stage 4 out but our experience is that they do come out for our workshop, how science works at the Natural History Museum, they do come out and they do book it. Our A-level days are booked out a year in advance.

Museums Journal: But how much of that would have happened without strategic commissioning, which is a specific strand of government funding?

Honor Gay: Well, that's really interesting. I think we wouldn't give it up. We wouldn't stop it. You know our director talks about it a huge amount. He's very proud of it, but at the same time we are really worried about what will happen when the cultural offer happens. You know not only is there no mention of science but there's not much of a role for national museums either it seems, so yes, it would be a terrible shame but …

Emma Newall: This is another reason I think for getting the teachers to come because my experience with working with teachers is they don't know what's on offer and any way that we can ensure that they understand what the programmes are that museums deliver.

Honor Gay: We try and get our examples in text books. We work a lot with publishers of the standard text. We try and cultivate relationships with exam boards and actually for secondary science that's a complete minefield. There are so many different exam boards and text books. You know, if you've got any tips I'd really love to hear them.

Museums Journal: What do we think the next five years holds in terms of developments in the national curriculum, funding streams, direction, content?

NickWinterbotham: I think the culture offer is terribly important. I think it would be a real struggle to get to become part of it and if we manage to do it, we'll actually learn quite a lot. It's an outrage that it hasn't been thought of properly. I think there are endless possibilities here. I think we have proved, each one of us in various different ways, that we can operate dynamically; that we can certainly step up given the opportunity.

It's easy to blame the government for this. We always blame the government for things, don't we? What we do know is the government hasn't got a big spending programme planned for any of this, therefore it's going to be a question of, well, do we work with corporates? Do we think of other ways around it? Do we work more closely with schools? The answer is, yes, we probably do. That's where most of our success has actually been recently.

I've already suggested that we're going to get overtaken by other governments who do want to make science their strong suit. It's partly because they haven't in the past. It's not true of Germany, but Portugal, in particular, in opening 15 science centres actually funded by the government, is saying, "We want a piece of the action." They actually want their children to step up and be a part of that and that's why they're doing it.

China; well, I mean, China's in a different league altogether. What they're offering, what they're investing in the museums that they are building at the moment is extraordinary. They're going to make ours look like tiddlers by comparison.

I think it's a shame about the Heritage Lottery Fund. It's a shame, in a sense, about the way the Olympics have impacted the opportunities we now have for developing in terms of museums. But in terms of science centres I think there's an awful lot of good ideas which we are sharing among each other and we are getting better at.

But if there isn't an injection of something which actually says these are inherently valuable, these actually can have demonstrable impacts on people - and there's plenty of research in the past that's done that but we need to keep on doing it - unless that happens I think the STEM agenda which is being talked about in the DIUS, the DCSF and the DCMS, three departments all which have an interest in supporting the STEM agenda, it won't be as vibrant and as significant to the UK as it ought to be.

There is a difference, a national difference, and that is the assemblies in both Wales and in Scotland and the governing body in Ireland have already accepted that science centres should get base funding. They have not done that in England and why not? There are 38 million people who presumably deserve the same sort of input and it would be good to see that happen.

Honor Gay: I'm more optimistic. I think for me, I've always been driven by the huge untapped potential of natural history museums. The Natural History Museum's secondary science; it's not an immediate leap and yet I think we have demonstrated that we have a real and tremendous contribution to make.

So our aspirations are that we grow our network and use the Natural History Museum's position as the national museum of natural history to inspire and support museums with natural history collections across England to make the best possible use of their collections for secondary science teaching.

I think what we have to offer is good and I think also that we've got quite a rigorous approach to trying to look at the impacts, difficult though that is, that I feel that it will be recognised by government or the corporate sector or trusts. It's about growth. I guess I'm coming from a very different point to science centres. I think for us progress so far has been tremendous. The curriculum is a complete gift and I think it's all to play for. But I am worried about the cultural offer and the need for strategic commissioning funding to keep on.

Martin Braund: Just from the point of view of teacher education, I think there are now examples of the way in which teacher educators, training colleges and universities are linked with the museum sector and I think that ought to continue and be made more available
.
The other thing I think that's useful, I don't know whether Emma has had experience with this, is getting teachers in their NQT year and their first few years of teaching to actually come back and talk to the student teachers and say, "Don't be frightened of doing this. Here's how I did it, this is how I tackled it, this is the value I got out of it, and this is what my students learned" and we've done a little bit of that at York.

In fact, I think one of the most fantastic quotes that I put in the book that I wrote with Michael Reiss was from an NQT teacher at the end of his first year and he was asked the question by a student teacher; what is the most beneficial thing that's happened to you this year and it was an out of classroom learning experience that he described.

He said it's not just the kind of learning that you get out of it, but it's the kind of social interaction with those students and the way you get to learn about their fears and aspirations - I think I'm almost quoting it now - and what they learn about you as well and it gives you a kind of human scale of interaction which gives you joy as a teacher and I thought it was fantastic.

I put the quote on the screen now every time and I'm just waiting for another NQT teacher to come back and relay a similar experience. It suddenly made me realise actually that's a really good thing to say to aspiring new teachers about giving it a go, you know, and if you're not sure about doing it in your NQT year you go and find the coordinator of visits in your school, you go and work on that.

I think also to have examples of what you can do on websites would be really good and linking through to what's already there; making it known.

Jean Franczyk: I'm very hopeful and I think my hope really is in the fact that I so strongly believe in the value and the power of the informal learning sector, environment and culture and I believe in that value at every point in the life cycle, so because we are social environments, people who come to us whether it's, you know, a young person with their teacher, with their family, with their peers, you can have a profound impact on their life and I hold dear to that.

I would hope that as a result of that I can help move the informal learning from the fringes of the conversation more to the centre. I think that would be a significant contribution to make and the aspiration that we have for the Science Museum is that we find a way to provide everybody with a science museum learning experience by the time they've reached the age of 14 actually so that we're getting to them before they're likely to turn off.

Emma Newall: Well, I don't know about having a crystal ball and looking into the future, but I can say what I hope is going to happen and that is I hope that the Science Learning Centre is going to be a much more coherent national network, that we can also then be pairing up with other regional museums and be offering some of the things that you've been doing down in London, because I think that London has been leading the way in this to be honest, and then using that nationally and having the regional science learning centres working with their own regional museums to make sure that teachers make the most of the opportunities that are there for themselves and their students.

Cris Edgell: My comment is really from a teacher's perspective. I can see a lot of big opportunities for our key stage 3 students particularly. The discussions about the sustainability and the durability I thought were really interesting. Although you can't really replace that sense of wonder when you come into the museum, you would like to try and recapture some of it on various stages to continue to read and have an interest in science.

I don't know about the systems or structures that museums have in place to facilitate that and especially with teachers looking for project work, cross-curricular work, ways of extending learning activities. I think they would welcome an opportunity to take some of the things that happen here and extend them in their schools when they get back.

Honor Gay: Can I make one more comment but it's not mine, it's Michael Reiss, at a science conference he said what I thought was the most amazing distillation about the difference between classroom and the museum.

What he said was that the classroom is a simplification of reality that the science concepts are abstracted and simplified and then you had the real world, which was messier and more complex. But what you had in a museum was it's like a hyper-concentration of reality where you've got far more than you'd ever find in the real world but it's interpreted by educators and that for him the dense and rich world of the museum had so much to offer science teaching.