The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has confirmed that it will not fund the Strategic Commissioning programme from March 2011, dealing a blow to the education partnerships established between national and regional museums across England as part of the project.
The MLA-backed scheme, which is jointly funded by the DCMS and Department for Education (DfE), aimed to widen access for schools to museum and archive education initiatives.
But a DfE spokesman said: “We have not made any announcements about future funding for this programme, although we will be reducing the number of centrally funded programmes that we support.
“We are working through the details of the spending review settlement to consider the options for supporting museum education programmes over the next spending period.”
Twelve national museums have each been awarded £160,000 annually since 2003 to work with more than 20 regional museum partners on educational and community-based schemes, as part of the programme.
Project participants have expressed concern at the development. Honor Gay, head of learning at the Natural History Museum, said: “It was incredibly valuable that the DCMS and DfE invested in museum education and gave us the opportunity to innovate.
“The programme’s success shows sustained government funding dedicated to museums education can make a real difference, and it would be a terrible shame if there were no such opportunities in the future.
“We are planning to sustain as much of the project as we can through core funding and fundraising.”
Ronan Brindley, principal manager (learning) at Manchester Art Gallery, said: “We ran two very successful programmes: Visual Dialogues [with Tate] and Design For Life [led by the Victoria and Albert Museum]. They were skills-based programmes and engaged young people.
With job-seeking becoming a greater challenge and training opportunities diminishing, there is great demand for such programmes. Yet our ability to fund them is not guaranteed.”