Little more than a year ago, Brian McMaster's review of how public money can best support excellence in the arts was published. It suggested that peer review and self-assessment should replace top-down targets in England. At the time, I was sceptical, not least because of a perceived swerve away from the access and inclusion agenda.
Last month, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published the results of its three pilot peer reviews. First, hats off to the fact they were published at all. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes nerves about making the findings available, but if the reports are to be meaningful, they have to be accessible - uncensored - to the public.
But it seems that reading the end result is just about the only role the public will have in the process. In most cases, the peer review panel met only with staff and trustees on their visits. Some "ad-hoc conversations with visitors" took place, but is that really enough to gain a measure of what the public thinks?
The honourable exception was Tyne and Wear Museums. It deliberately organised for the peer reviewers to meet with its People's Panel, its disabled access group and other representatives from the local community.
The process has other flaws: it is reliant on the information provided by the museums themselves, it can be dependent on the personal taste of the reviewers and is therefore, by its nature, subjective.
Hopefully these problems can be corrected although there is still a question mark about how, and if, the peer reviews will be rolled out to other DCMS-sponsored museums.
What the pilots show is that while peer review can provide an insight into an organisation, it is only a tiny part of the jigsaw. Without actual measures, year-on-year visitor figures, audience analysis, and comparable data, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make a judgement.
Unless peer review is used in conjunction with other data and takes the public's views into account, it could become just another fairly meaningless paper exercise.
Sharon Heal, editor
sharon@museumsassociation.org
Last month, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published the results of its three pilot peer reviews. First, hats off to the fact they were published at all. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes nerves about making the findings available, but if the reports are to be meaningful, they have to be accessible - uncensored - to the public.
But it seems that reading the end result is just about the only role the public will have in the process. In most cases, the peer review panel met only with staff and trustees on their visits. Some "ad-hoc conversations with visitors" took place, but is that really enough to gain a measure of what the public thinks?
The honourable exception was Tyne and Wear Museums. It deliberately organised for the peer reviewers to meet with its People's Panel, its disabled access group and other representatives from the local community.
The process has other flaws: it is reliant on the information provided by the museums themselves, it can be dependent on the personal taste of the reviewers and is therefore, by its nature, subjective.
Hopefully these problems can be corrected although there is still a question mark about how, and if, the peer reviews will be rolled out to other DCMS-sponsored museums.
What the pilots show is that while peer review can provide an insight into an organisation, it is only a tiny part of the jigsaw. Without actual measures, year-on-year visitor figures, audience analysis, and comparable data, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make a judgement.
Unless peer review is used in conjunction with other data and takes the public's views into account, it could become just another fairly meaningless paper exercise.
Sharon Heal, editor
sharon@museumsassociation.org
