When senior managers at a national museum learned that a faith group made up of staff wanting to discuss issues around collections and interpretation had met for the first time, it reacted nervously. The group never met again. This story goes some way to explaining the influence that senior decision-makers have on an institution.
Attempts to correct an imbalance in the diversity of the workforce at all levels of museums were meant to have an impact on policy and practice. These attempts have focused mostly on programmes to increase the number of people from visible ethnicities in what is a predominantly white workforce.
In 2007, the then culture minister David Lammy not only famously described museum trustees as “pale, male and stale”, but said there was a “whiff of racism” in England’s museums because people of African and Asian descent were under-represented in top-level jobs.
Change in thinking
Maurice Davies, head of policy and communication at the Museums Association (MA), believes thinking has changed. He says the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has pursued the issue by funding programmes such as the MA’s Diversify scheme, and supporting the hubs’ development of workforce diversity plans, albeit following initial pressure from Lammy.
But Lucy Shaw, the MA’s Diversify coordinator, points out that the 100 people who have been through the MA’s Diversify programme since its inception in 1999 is still small compared with the 40,000 museum staff in the UK.
“It’s a drop in the ocean. You cannot expect to parachute a person into an organisation and change it overnight,” she says.
Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), has long been a champion of diversity in the sector.
“Diversify has been very influential in allowing existing staff to see people from different backgrounds and this has helped to change thinking,” he says. Nairne adds that programmes such as Diversify can make a difference, but they are not the only ways to bring about change.
In July, the NPG announced plans to acquire the earliest known British oil painting of an African Muslim. The Ayuba Suleiman Diallo portrait shows, says Nairne, that the institution – the trustees and senior management team – share a passion for change.
He says the gallery may not have considered buying such a portrait 10 years ago. However, Nairne admits that the NPG senior management team is still all white, although he points to the inclusion of more women.
Paul Reid is director of the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), which has recently received £5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund to open a heritage centre in London in 2011.
He believes attracting a diverse range of staff is important because it brings in new curators who will tell stories from their perspective. And he argues that it is up to senior managers to make it clear to staff members why a diverse workforce is important.
“Once the organisation is clear on where it stands, it has a serious job to inform its staff,” says Reid. The BCA intends to provide training to increase the number of archivists and curators from African heritage backgrounds.
“Diversify is window dressing unless you get them [Diversify graduates] involved in leading on interpretation,” says Arthur Torrington, campaigner and secretary of the Windrush Foundation. “What remains is still a resistance to open up.” He says the management wants to keep control of what happens within the institution.
Active promotion
At the Victoria and Albert Museum, diversity is being promoted in many different areas. It has a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) group that is attempting to unearth the stories in its collections that relate to this marginalised segment of society. The group runs public events and talks, and has made links with organisations outside the museum.
The museum is also working hard on disability issues. The number of staff with disabilities has increased from 2% to 7% over the past eight years, and all front-of-house staff receive training in British Sign Language. The museum has recently started to collect disability visitor figures.
Eithne Nightingale, the museum’s head of diversity strategy, says the responsibility for trying to embed the disability agenda into the mainstream of the museum was given to a general programmer within the museum who lacked specialist knowledge. This led to complaints from disabled users of the museum. As a result, there is now a designated disability post-holder.
In the regions, minds have been focused thanks in part to programmes such as the MA’s £100,000 Smarter Museums scheme, which was funded by the MLA. Smarter Museums, which began in October 2009 and ran until spring this year, was designed to allow 10 English, non-hub, non-national museums to develop policies to embed diversity in their organisations.
Also in 2009, the MLA asked the MA to work with the 47 hub museums to offer support and advice on taking their workforce diversity forward.
These initiatives followed the MLA decision in 2007 to ask the hubs to create workforce diversity action plans and embed them across the museums. The MA’s programmes were ways of keeping momentum going and working across regions.
Many museums were involved in important diversity work prior to an action plan. But according to the MLA’s project coordinators, some approached the task in a half-hearted way, perhaps because they didn’t understand it or lacked confidence.
Rewording job ads
Some museums stood out for their positive approach. At Leicester, front-of-house posts were advertised as customer services representatives so applicants would not be put off by the word museum. There were more applications from diverse groups as a result.
Alison Taylor, senior inclusion and diversity officer at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, says the museum was initially designated lead partner for inclusion and diversity in the West Midlands hub.
With four inclusion staff compared with just one in many of the other hub museums, Coventry provided support to the rest. This has now changed, as people have become more experienced and confident in pushing the diversity agenda forward, she says.
Although the highest-level decision-making at Coventry doesn’t involve people from the inclusion and diversity team or staff from non-traditional backgrounds, Taylor says this isn’t a drawback.
“The inclusion and diversity team aren’t the only ones pushing the agenda. Management are signed up to it to the extent that it does have an impact,” she adds.
Workforce diversity schemes targeting cultural and arts organisations are undergoing a significant change. Social class rather than ethnicity has taken centre stage, with two schemes having been launched in the past few months.
The response to the MA’s scheme offering bursaries for people from lower-income groups, which started in April, has been overwhelming. During the early years of the MA’s Diversify initiative, Museums Journal received several letters calling for a scheme to assist people from a working-class background, who can be excluded from accessing a museum job.
The new scheme had more than 200 applications for nine places. People from visible minorities can also apply for the scheme if they qualify.
Meanwhile, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has appointed the Jerwood Charitable Foundation to manage the DCMS Jerwood Creative Bursaries, funded by the government department and Arts Council England, for those who experience financial barriers to jobs in the arts (see box).
But why has there been a shift? The MA’s Davies believes the change was partly in response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission sending a message that diversity was much broader than visible ethnicity. “There was a big political shift that museums followed,” he says.
Work to do
So is it “job done” on the issue of visible ethnicity? “An all-inclusive policy shift might have been a bit premature,” says Davies. “There is still a lot to do around ethnicity.” (The MA continues to run its management traineeships for visible minorities, which is funded by the MLA).
It appears that by the very nature of focusing on diversity, thinking has changed. But the reality is that there are still few appointments made in higher-grade jobs. At the V&A, Nightingale says most visible minorities are recruited to IT, finance, security, human resources and visitor services – and all tend to be in grades lower than first-line manager.
The museum is forming a diversity employment working party to address this. Nightingale says that it may be that, given the forthcoming cuts, the V&A will look at opportunities for progression or movement within departments, rather than recruitment.
Nightingale says: “I believe increasing diversity of audiences is closely related to diversity of staffing”.
If she is right, then all schemes, whether tackling ethnicity, disability, social class, faith, gender, sexuality or age, have a role to play.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport Jerwood Creative Bursaries are specifically aimed at those who cannot afford to pay for training or have difficulty taking up unpaid internships.
Applicants must have graduated from university in 2009 or 2010 and achieved at least a 2:1 class of degree. The scheme is running as a two-year pilot programme until March 2012.
The first round is under way with 22 organisations involved, including Southampton Art Gallery, Artangel and Brighton Photo Biennial. All recipients receive a salary of £15,00 for a one-year placement.
The organisation receives £5,000 for supporting the paid intern. The second round will be advertised in the autumn and aims to involve a further 20 bodies.
The Museums Association’s (MA) bursaries for people on low incomes has made awards to six trainees for 2010-11. The scheme is funded by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the host institution.
Among the museums involved are the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Museum of London, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich and Bankfield Museum in Halifax.
Three bursaries will include a master’s in museum studies, a five-month museum placement, and a contribution of £2,000 towards course expenses and professional development with the MA.
The remaining three include a 12-month museum placement with a contribution of £1,000 towards a tailored programme of formal learning and professional development with the MA.
All six recipients are white and have a first degree – neither of which are part of the eligibility criteria.