Age concern
In discussions about audience development, young people tend to be the focus of attention, much like they are for newspapers looking at their readership.
It is true that most under 16-year-olds are not regular museum-goers, just as they are not the main consumers of print media. But they are superseded in the stay-at-home-stakes by another group: older people, specifically those aged 70 and above.
According to the latest Department for Culture, Media and Sport Taking Part survey, which analyses participation in culture, 63.5% of 16-24-year-olds did not set foot in a museum or gallery in 2009-10.
That figure leaps to almost 80% for the 75-plus age group. (And in both groups, the numbers of non-attenders are up on previous years, though visitor figures to museums generally have increased for the past five years.)
At one time, this would have merited scant attention. After all, people in their eighth decade have traditionally given up doing lots of things, like going to work. But times are changing and people are living longer.
While much of the debate about the ‘ageing population’ is couched in terms of the ‘burden’ they (we) will present to the economy and the National Health Service, there is an upside, which is that more people are remaining active longer after retirement and are looking for new interests.
According to David Sinclair, head of policy and research at thinktank the International Longevity Centre, museums may be missing a trick in failing to target older age groups.
“In audience development terms, museums have tended to focus on excluded groups such as younger people and ethnic minority communities,” he says. “There’s also been this sort of argument that ‘all our volunteers are older anyway’, and it’s not entirely true.”
The centre commissioned Bristol University to analyse data from another survey, the English Latitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA). The research, to be published this month, indicates that a significant minority (26% of 85-89-year-olds) would like to go to museums and galleries more often.
It’s not clear what the barriers are, alth-ough health, transport and ‘fear of crime’ are probably in there. Ageism may also be a factor, Sinclair suggests, in that if all of the imagery in museum advertising is of young people it builds a perception among older generations that the place is ‘not for them’.
“I don’t want to be critical of the sector as there is some fantastic work going on,” Sinclair says. “And there hasn’t been the funding to focus on older people, to be fair.
But in terms of participation, there is some ‘low-hanging fruit’ there.” Sinclair says some museums are already doing excellent work with older age-groups and one particular growth area in recent years has been intergenerational learning.
Magic Me, an arts organisation in Tower Hamlets, London, specialises in projects which bring young and old together. There has been a significant increase in demand says its director, Susan Langford.
“Intergenerational learning has been going up the agenda for about five years,” she says. “I think the whole issue about the ageing population has finally come to the fore and then there’s the question of the relationship between the older generation and younger people. What’s the reciprocity between them is a big question at the moment.”
She says there’s also the wider concern about how to build neighbourhoods that are better to live in and how to get people involved in their communities at street level. All this is linked to the big society political agenda.
A recent project with the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green in east London on a Grand Explorers theme focused on grandparents who care for their grandchildren full-time and involved them working with a puppeteer and theatre practitioner to explore the museum, then stage their own show.
The great benefit of intergenerational work is the contrasting perspectives it offers on collections, says Langford. “The more varied the group, the more angles you will have in the room. Sometimes it will be Bengali or Somali young women working with a more mixed group of older women.
"You find that the things older Jewish women tell us about living in the East End in the 1930s are echoed by today’s young women who are going through some of the same struggles in their own community, and how that fits with the bigger community and the questions of integration and assimilation.”
Other intergenerational initiatives include a project in Carmarthenshire where the Oriel Myrddin Gallery brought together older people from two care homes with primary school children to explore its exhibitions. Both groups produced stories and pictures.
The children acted as guides and curators on gallery visits and the older people shared skills such as knitting, which was linked to a contemporary craft and design show.
Besides ticking a lot of learning and creativity boxes for the children, evaluation showed that the older people had, among other things, gained more confidence by getting out of the care home, meeting new people and visiting the gallery.
It was one of a number of projects exploring the benefits of engagement with older people undertaken by gallery education organisation Engage Cymru with funding from the Arts Council of Wales and the Millennium Stadium Charitable Trust. It followed a report showing that just 3% of galleries in Wales were taking steps to appeal deliberately to older people.
Another development that offers museums a way into expanding their work with older people is Race Online 2012, a national campaign to get more of the population using the internet. Digital guru Martha Lane Fox is leading the initiative for the government.
According to research for the campaign, 50% of 65 to 74-year-olds in the UK do not have access to the internet and its services, rising to 75% of the 75-plus age group. Of the 65-74 age group, 63% maintain they have ‘no reason’ to go online despite the fact that they are missing out on services that are cheaper over the internet.
Natasha Innocent, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council’s senior policy adviser on learning and skills, is on secondment to the campaign. She says Race Online 2012 presents a significant opportunity for museums.
“In the cultural sector especially, we have focused on digitising collections and the bit that we don’t think about is digital inclusion,” Innocent says. “There’s now an opportunity to use [collections] as a hook to encourage people who aren’t online to think about it.”
She also points to First Click, a two-year BBC campaign, launched last month, which is encouraging people to take the first step online. It is looking for organisations to link up with that can provide beginner’s computer courses.
Race Online 2012 is effectively a large lobbying exercise and has no cash to give away. However, big corporates including BT, Google, Microsoft and some mobile phone companies are backing it and offering support in different ways, including providing recycled computers, volunteer staff and hosting events.
Innocent says: “Corporates need a link with an organisation on the ground to help them deliver what they have. So it could be an opportunity for museums who might be interested in partnering with them.”
In the ‘age of austerity’, it’s unlikely that new funds will be flowing from government for major new museum and gallery initiatives. But it is interesting that one of the significant funders in the cultural sector, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, has made support for older people’s projects one of its key priorities.
In the past decade, there have been various watchwords inserted into a funding bid that have made the eyes of the purse-holder light up – ‘young people’, ‘ethnic minority’, ‘inclusion’ and most recently ‘green’. Now perhaps there’s a new one to add to the list: ‘senior’.
Julie Nightingale is a freelance journalist
Magic Me: www.magicme.co.uk
Engage Cymru case studies: www.engage.org/projects/cymraeg_older_people.aspx
Race Online: http://raceonline2012.org/
Picturing the Past, a photography project at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, brought together men at opposite ends of their lives.
Sixth-formers from Dulwich College collaborated with a group aged 65 and above on an exhibition, held in September, in which the younger group re-created shots taken years earlier of their older colleagues.
They may have been separated by six or seven decades but all shared at least one common interest: tinkering with machines.
“At the first meeting they were all fascinated by looking at all of the cameras,” says Clare Ferdinando, community outreach manager who ran the project as part of the gallery’s Good Times: Art for Older People programme.
Working with a professional photographer, they studied an exhibition by American painters the Wyeths, looking at composition and how the artists created a sense of adventure through a single image.
“There was a lot of interaction, with the boys particularly learning about the history of the older group,” Ferdinando says. “For example, there’s a photograph of one gentleman, now in his seventies, having a laugh with his mates in a pub in Clapham after the war.
“So he talked about everything, including the sandwiches they are eating and what they had and didn’t have to eat at the time, then he directed the boys on how to re-enact the scene.”
Most of the boys had had little or no contact with older people, which is not unusual with other young people the gallery works with. Likewise, the older men had preconceptions about young people based on media reports and while they may have had young grandchildren, they don’t live nearby.
“When they work together there’s this wonderful breaking down of barriers and stereotypes on both sides,” says Ferdinando.