A week may be a long time in politics, but two years can fly by. Arts Council England (ACE) was announced as the successor to the disbanded Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) in November 2010, but the rapid changeover, followed by the launch of its re-engineered Renaissance in the Regions programme – not to mention a major restructure of the arts council itself – mean there’s been barely a chance since then to pause for breath and reflect on how the move has gone.
“Any one of those things on its own would have been tricky,” says Hedley Swain, who transferred from the MLA to the arts council to become the director of museums and Renaissance. “We spent a lot of time thinking about where we aligned and where we were different.”
When the MLA fell casualty to the fledgling coalition’s bonfire of the quangos, there was understandable concern that museums in England could lose their voice without a separate body to act in their interests, especially with the public sector facing unprecedented budget cuts.
The MLA was far from perfect, went the general view, but it was better than being swallowed up by a much larger body such as ACE, with an already-extensive portfolio and far less understanding of the museum sector and its needs.
This was particularly pertinent given that a review of Renaissance in 2009 had recommended sweeping changes to the flagship funding programme for regional museums – including scrapping the existing hub system – and it would fall on ACE to implement those changes.
Swain argues that the arts council’s larger size has worked in the sector’s favour so far, allowing the transition to be relatively smooth. “The arts council is used to giving out very large amounts of money,” he says. “There were a lot of things, like different application models, that we could take off the shelf and adapt.”
The arts council also won credit for its willingness to listen to the museum sector on key issues – agreeing to drop the proposed Renaissance model of funding around eight core museums after hearing concerns that this would be disruptive and risky in the new financial climate, which has seen the programme’s budget cut by 15%.
ACE eventually decided on a grant scheme similar to its National Portfolio programme for arts organisations. So rather than spreading the funding more thinly, 16 major partner museums – a mix of individual museums, services, trusts and consortia – were selected to share £20m a year until 2015.
Applicants had to demonstrate how they would meet some of the five criteria outlined in ACE’s 10-year strategic plan, Achieving Great Art for Everyone. They were also given the option of scaling back on the regional responsibilities that were a key feature of the old hub system.
“The point was to free up the major partners to become beacons of excellence,” says Swain. “In a few cases that involved doing work across a specific region, but they do not by default take responsibility for museum development.
“The work they do is incredibly varied across the whole country, but there is a particular emphasis on resilience and excellence,” he adds.
Additional development work and geographical gaps are now addressed by other strands of the programme (see boxes below).
“The purpose is holistic. It only works with the other programmes in the round,” continues Swain. “The old system had become ossified. The whole scheme now gives us a lot more flexibility.”
Cutting 29 museum hubs down to 16 major partners was never going to be easy, however, and some large areas, including the whole of the East Midlands, were controversially left without major grant funding when the recipients were announced in January this year.
In addition, many in the sector felt that the emphasis on excellence – particularly regarding collections – over participation and public impact betrayed a misunderstanding of what museums do and went against the original ethos of the Renaissance programme.
But with the dust now settling on those decisions, how have the major partner museums been faring under the new regime?
“We welcome the forward-thinking approach that ACE takes,” says Gordon Watson, the director of the Lakeland Arts Trust in Cumbria, which formed a new consortium with Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust to successfully bid for major grant funding.
ACE cites the flexibility to branch out from mainly city-based hubs as one of the key advantages of the new-look Renaissance scheme, and Watson agrees.
“We are bringing together both urban and rural areas, from Tullie House in the centre of Carlisle to Wordsworth in the heart of the Lake District,” he says.
“Cumbria is a very significant tourist market with 15.3m tourists a year. [Being a consortium] has given us a stronger voice in the region among organisations outside the sector – councils and tourism boards. We’re able to talk to or put pressure on them in a way that as single organisations we wouldn’t have been able to.”
To meet the arts council’s criteria, the consortium concentrated on excellence of collections and audience development for children and young people, with a particular focus on resilience.
“Our business models are very much focused on raising money ourselves, looking at enterprise and finding ways to make ourselves stronger,” says Watson.
Like many of the major partners, Cumbria is also keen to improve existing partnerships and develop new ones. As well as strengthening a partnership with Hadrian’s Wall sites, the consortium is looking to join forces with other major partner museums outside Cumbria to share key works and expertise.
It has also maintained a regional focus, earmarking 25% of its Renaissance grant to work with other museums and heritage sites across Cumbria, with plans to reach more rural areas, develop online resources and run a programme of nine apprenticeships.
Birmingham Museums Trust, a newly formed trust between Thinktank and former hub Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, also won major partner funding this year. “The money will support 30 jobs, including 18 new posts,” says the director of the trust, Ann Sumner.
The trust is meeting its excellence goals by hiring three curators to oversee its contemporary art, natural science and Islamic and Asian collections, she says. “They will really increase our representation of those cultures – it’s a direct response to audience demand.”
Other projects include capital developments such as a new gallery to display the Staffordshire Hoard collection of Anglo-Saxon gold. “We want West Mercia to become associated with the Anglo-Saxons in the way Bath is with the Romans,” says Sumner.
Like Cumbria, the Birmingham partnership has maintained a focus on working with regional museums, including developing a regional loans programme and a project to provide mobile museum boxes and educational services to smaller institutions.
In contrast to the MLA, the arts council has taken a lighter touch in monitoring how the major grant money is spent, though each major partner works closely with one of ACE’s relationship managers.
John Roles is head of Leeds Museums and Galleries, a former hub that retained major grant funding in a region where other big players such as Hull Museums and Museums Sheffield lost out on such funding.
“The light touch is definitely welcome,” says Roles. “With the MLA, it was as if world war three broke out once because we were 50p out on one of our budgets. The end result of that was less impact. ACE seems more concerned with outcomes than with numbers, as long as you remain within the overall budget – that’s encouraging.”
The museum service is largely maintaining and building on its existing priorities as a hub, which includes establishing Leeds as a child-friendly city and investing in retail and environmental sustainability.
But does the arts council truly understand the museum sector yet? Roles is not fully convinced that it does.
“It is genuinely trying to understand museums but there’s a way to go yet. It is still surprised by the range of activities that we do. There’s an assumption that we were behind other arts organisations – so they will encourage us to work with artists when we’ve been doing things like that all along.”
Roles also questions whether ACE’s emphasis on collaboration and partnership is really such a panacea in less prosperous times. “The scale of cuts varies greatly on the ground and is going to have an impact on just how feasible it is to do partnership working,” he says, mentioning a recent partnership where the leading institution had to drop out because of budgetary constraints.
Roles believes the disruption within the arts council itself may have hindered the development of a mutual understanding so far. Last month, ACE announced a staff cut of 21% and reduced its regional boundaries from nine to just five. The head of one museum says it will now take him more than an hour’s travel each way to go and meet with arts council representatives.
“They’re struggling to keep their eye on the ball a bit – it’s all quite uncertain at the moment,” says Roles.
Off the record, others are more forthright about their experiences of working under ACE. “A recurrent theme is that we are offered money for what they think is needed, not for what we think is needed,” says one museum director, who cites ACE’s “apparent insistence on art being included with everything” as an example.
“Museums at Night is a long-standing project which has been growing in importance but which, for many museums, is expensive to deliver. ACE comes along and offers contemporary artists to spice up the event. This is not what museums actually wanted or needed.
“It is like letting the art teacher loose in a history lesson – fun for a while but without the knowledge they are lost.”
Hedley Swain of ACE sees it differently. “What we really want is to make sure the major partners are using their core ‘museumness’ to do great stuff.”
But for some in the museum sector, it still seems to be a case of “us” versus “them”.
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
ACE’s Strategic Support Fund, which will finance 82 projects in 2012-13, is aimed at picking up some of the regional work that hubs used to carry out. The 82 projects will share nearly £7m in 2012-13, and there will be £15m a year in 2013-14 and 2014-15.
“The hubs were all larger urban museums. The strategic support fund allows us to fund organisations of all shapes and sizes in different areas,” says Hedley Swain of ACE.
But one director, whose organisation won a strategic support grant, says: “I’m frankly appalled by the amount of effort that is going into targets. We’ve got to spend the money and get results in seven months – you’re hard pushed to get really good value for money in that sort of time.”
The director also takes issue with ACE’s insistence on “new” work. “It encouraged us to (a) spend it all on consultancies and (b) spend it on things which were nice-to-haves rather than planned.
“Better value would have been obtained by enhancing what was already there. For instance, we have an excellent education service that cannot cope with demand. Money directed to this could have gone straight into delivery, instead of on projects which required us to call in consultants, designers, architects, builders, etc.”
Museum Development Fund (£8m over three years) Nine museum services, including seven major partner museums, have been awarded just over £8m from the fund to provide a network of professional advice and support to smaller museums.
Designation Development Fund (£2.1m over three years) 25 projects to develop Designated museum collections in England will receive grants of between £40,000 and £90,000 for 2012-14.
Subject Specialist Networks (£174,600 in 2012-13) There were 22 SSNs awarded funding this year, including the Museum Ethnographers Group and the Social History Curators Group.
Prism Fund (£250,000 a year) and V&A Purchase Fund (£750,00 a year) Though these funds were never intended to be part of Renaissance, ACE has used them to finance the acquisition and conservation of items in science and art collections.
First world war commemorations (£121,171 over three years) ACE has given this sum to Imperial War Museums to fund a liaison officer whose role will be to coordinate commemorations across England.
“Any one of those things on its own would have been tricky,” says Hedley Swain, who transferred from the MLA to the arts council to become the director of museums and Renaissance. “We spent a lot of time thinking about where we aligned and where we were different.”
When the MLA fell casualty to the fledgling coalition’s bonfire of the quangos, there was understandable concern that museums in England could lose their voice without a separate body to act in their interests, especially with the public sector facing unprecedented budget cuts.
The MLA was far from perfect, went the general view, but it was better than being swallowed up by a much larger body such as ACE, with an already-extensive portfolio and far less understanding of the museum sector and its needs.
This was particularly pertinent given that a review of Renaissance in 2009 had recommended sweeping changes to the flagship funding programme for regional museums – including scrapping the existing hub system – and it would fall on ACE to implement those changes.
Swain argues that the arts council’s larger size has worked in the sector’s favour so far, allowing the transition to be relatively smooth. “The arts council is used to giving out very large amounts of money,” he says. “There were a lot of things, like different application models, that we could take off the shelf and adapt.”
The arts council also won credit for its willingness to listen to the museum sector on key issues – agreeing to drop the proposed Renaissance model of funding around eight core museums after hearing concerns that this would be disruptive and risky in the new financial climate, which has seen the programme’s budget cut by 15%.
ACE eventually decided on a grant scheme similar to its National Portfolio programme for arts organisations. So rather than spreading the funding more thinly, 16 major partner museums – a mix of individual museums, services, trusts and consortia – were selected to share £20m a year until 2015.
Applicants had to demonstrate how they would meet some of the five criteria outlined in ACE’s 10-year strategic plan, Achieving Great Art for Everyone. They were also given the option of scaling back on the regional responsibilities that were a key feature of the old hub system.
“The point was to free up the major partners to become beacons of excellence,” says Swain. “In a few cases that involved doing work across a specific region, but they do not by default take responsibility for museum development.
“The work they do is incredibly varied across the whole country, but there is a particular emphasis on resilience and excellence,” he adds.
Additional development work and geographical gaps are now addressed by other strands of the programme (see boxes below).
“The purpose is holistic. It only works with the other programmes in the round,” continues Swain. “The old system had become ossified. The whole scheme now gives us a lot more flexibility.”
Cutting 29 museum hubs down to 16 major partners was never going to be easy, however, and some large areas, including the whole of the East Midlands, were controversially left without major grant funding when the recipients were announced in January this year.
In addition, many in the sector felt that the emphasis on excellence – particularly regarding collections – over participation and public impact betrayed a misunderstanding of what museums do and went against the original ethos of the Renaissance programme.
But with the dust now settling on those decisions, how have the major partner museums been faring under the new regime?
“We welcome the forward-thinking approach that ACE takes,” says Gordon Watson, the director of the Lakeland Arts Trust in Cumbria, which formed a new consortium with Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust to successfully bid for major grant funding.
ACE cites the flexibility to branch out from mainly city-based hubs as one of the key advantages of the new-look Renaissance scheme, and Watson agrees.
“We are bringing together both urban and rural areas, from Tullie House in the centre of Carlisle to Wordsworth in the heart of the Lake District,” he says.
“Cumbria is a very significant tourist market with 15.3m tourists a year. [Being a consortium] has given us a stronger voice in the region among organisations outside the sector – councils and tourism boards. We’re able to talk to or put pressure on them in a way that as single organisations we wouldn’t have been able to.”
To meet the arts council’s criteria, the consortium concentrated on excellence of collections and audience development for children and young people, with a particular focus on resilience.
“Our business models are very much focused on raising money ourselves, looking at enterprise and finding ways to make ourselves stronger,” says Watson.
Like many of the major partners, Cumbria is also keen to improve existing partnerships and develop new ones. As well as strengthening a partnership with Hadrian’s Wall sites, the consortium is looking to join forces with other major partner museums outside Cumbria to share key works and expertise.
It has also maintained a regional focus, earmarking 25% of its Renaissance grant to work with other museums and heritage sites across Cumbria, with plans to reach more rural areas, develop online resources and run a programme of nine apprenticeships.
Birmingham Museums Trust, a newly formed trust between Thinktank and former hub Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, also won major partner funding this year. “The money will support 30 jobs, including 18 new posts,” says the director of the trust, Ann Sumner.
The trust is meeting its excellence goals by hiring three curators to oversee its contemporary art, natural science and Islamic and Asian collections, she says. “They will really increase our representation of those cultures – it’s a direct response to audience demand.”
Other projects include capital developments such as a new gallery to display the Staffordshire Hoard collection of Anglo-Saxon gold. “We want West Mercia to become associated with the Anglo-Saxons in the way Bath is with the Romans,” says Sumner.
Like Cumbria, the Birmingham partnership has maintained a focus on working with regional museums, including developing a regional loans programme and a project to provide mobile museum boxes and educational services to smaller institutions.
In contrast to the MLA, the arts council has taken a lighter touch in monitoring how the major grant money is spent, though each major partner works closely with one of ACE’s relationship managers.
John Roles is head of Leeds Museums and Galleries, a former hub that retained major grant funding in a region where other big players such as Hull Museums and Museums Sheffield lost out on such funding.
“The light touch is definitely welcome,” says Roles. “With the MLA, it was as if world war three broke out once because we were 50p out on one of our budgets. The end result of that was less impact. ACE seems more concerned with outcomes than with numbers, as long as you remain within the overall budget – that’s encouraging.”
The museum service is largely maintaining and building on its existing priorities as a hub, which includes establishing Leeds as a child-friendly city and investing in retail and environmental sustainability.
But does the arts council truly understand the museum sector yet? Roles is not fully convinced that it does.
“It is genuinely trying to understand museums but there’s a way to go yet. It is still surprised by the range of activities that we do. There’s an assumption that we were behind other arts organisations – so they will encourage us to work with artists when we’ve been doing things like that all along.”
Roles also questions whether ACE’s emphasis on collaboration and partnership is really such a panacea in less prosperous times. “The scale of cuts varies greatly on the ground and is going to have an impact on just how feasible it is to do partnership working,” he says, mentioning a recent partnership where the leading institution had to drop out because of budgetary constraints.
Roles believes the disruption within the arts council itself may have hindered the development of a mutual understanding so far. Last month, ACE announced a staff cut of 21% and reduced its regional boundaries from nine to just five. The head of one museum says it will now take him more than an hour’s travel each way to go and meet with arts council representatives.
“They’re struggling to keep their eye on the ball a bit – it’s all quite uncertain at the moment,” says Roles.
Off the record, others are more forthright about their experiences of working under ACE. “A recurrent theme is that we are offered money for what they think is needed, not for what we think is needed,” says one museum director, who cites ACE’s “apparent insistence on art being included with everything” as an example.
“Museums at Night is a long-standing project which has been growing in importance but which, for many museums, is expensive to deliver. ACE comes along and offers contemporary artists to spice up the event. This is not what museums actually wanted or needed.
“It is like letting the art teacher loose in a history lesson – fun for a while but without the knowledge they are lost.”
Hedley Swain of ACE sees it differently. “What we really want is to make sure the major partners are using their core ‘museumness’ to do great stuff.”
But for some in the museum sector, it still seems to be a case of “us” versus “them”.
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
Skewed priorities in funding?
ACE’s Strategic Support Fund, which will finance 82 projects in 2012-13, is aimed at picking up some of the regional work that hubs used to carry out. The 82 projects will share nearly £7m in 2012-13, and there will be £15m a year in 2013-14 and 2014-15.
“The hubs were all larger urban museums. The strategic support fund allows us to fund organisations of all shapes and sizes in different areas,” says Hedley Swain of ACE.
But one director, whose organisation won a strategic support grant, says: “I’m frankly appalled by the amount of effort that is going into targets. We’ve got to spend the money and get results in seven months – you’re hard pushed to get really good value for money in that sort of time.”
The director also takes issue with ACE’s insistence on “new” work. “It encouraged us to (a) spend it all on consultancies and (b) spend it on things which were nice-to-haves rather than planned.
“Better value would have been obtained by enhancing what was already there. For instance, we have an excellent education service that cannot cope with demand. Money directed to this could have gone straight into delivery, instead of on projects which required us to call in consultants, designers, architects, builders, etc.”
Other funding streams
Museum Development Fund (£8m over three years) Nine museum services, including seven major partner museums, have been awarded just over £8m from the fund to provide a network of professional advice and support to smaller museums.
Designation Development Fund (£2.1m over three years) 25 projects to develop Designated museum collections in England will receive grants of between £40,000 and £90,000 for 2012-14.
Subject Specialist Networks (£174,600 in 2012-13) There were 22 SSNs awarded funding this year, including the Museum Ethnographers Group and the Social History Curators Group.
Prism Fund (£250,000 a year) and V&A Purchase Fund (£750,00 a year) Though these funds were never intended to be part of Renaissance, ACE has used them to finance the acquisition and conservation of items in science and art collections.
First world war commemorations (£121,171 over three years) ACE has given this sum to Imperial War Museums to fund a liaison officer whose role will be to coordinate commemorations across England.
