So how does it feel to work in the museums and heritage sector in the middle of some of the most savage government cuts in a generation?
I wouldn’t mind guessing that, for many of you, it looks pretty damn bleak. Jobs and funding slashed, museums shut down and volunteers set to fill what were once salaried posts.
This month, the University of East London and Birkbeck, University of London, launch a raft of new postgraduate courses in heritage studies. In the face of all this, you might be forgiven for thinking we must have taken leave of our senses.
Well, the timing of these new courses is far from coincidental. The simple reason is that a recession is a good time for retraining. Redundancies and the trend to replace full-time posts with part-time contracts mean that many people will have time to invest in updating their portfolio.
In-house training is often the first casualty of over-stretched budgets, so existing staff need to keep a careful eye on their own development, such as keeping up to speed with digital and online skills, for example.
For this reason, I think it is important for the higher-education sector to offer the flexibility of part-time and evening courses.
I also hope we can make some inroads into bringing people on and up the career ladder. The local demographic means that our students from a great range of ethnic backgrounds – in fact, our student body is one of the most diverse in the country.
The Museums Association has fought a long campaign on increasing staff diversity. The results have been encouraging, but overall, progress has been painfully slow, particularly the levels above that of the ‘shop floor’.
I hope that having heritage sector training available at the heart of the most diverse communities in the UK will offer a local and convenient stepping stone into the industry for our own graduates.
I have worked in the museum sector in one way or another for 20 years, and it still seems tricky to make the leap from, say, a gallery attendant to an archivist, a curator or an education officer – which is why I think it is important for the sector to have access to directly relevant courses that will give people a real insight into what these roles entail.
Looking to the longer term, I don’t think that our sector’s future prospects are actually so bleak. Public interest in the past seems, if anything, stronger than ever.
Museum and gallery visitor numbers are strong. And the Olympic Games are coming. Like it or not, the eyes of the world will be on the UK and thousands of visitors will surely follow. So this really isn’t a bad time for thinking about what skills we all need to help build the sector of the future.
Toby Butler is the leader of the heritage studies programme at the Raphael Samuel History Centre, University of East London
I wouldn’t mind guessing that, for many of you, it looks pretty damn bleak. Jobs and funding slashed, museums shut down and volunteers set to fill what were once salaried posts.
This month, the University of East London and Birkbeck, University of London, launch a raft of new postgraduate courses in heritage studies. In the face of all this, you might be forgiven for thinking we must have taken leave of our senses.
Well, the timing of these new courses is far from coincidental. The simple reason is that a recession is a good time for retraining. Redundancies and the trend to replace full-time posts with part-time contracts mean that many people will have time to invest in updating their portfolio.
In-house training is often the first casualty of over-stretched budgets, so existing staff need to keep a careful eye on their own development, such as keeping up to speed with digital and online skills, for example.
For this reason, I think it is important for the higher-education sector to offer the flexibility of part-time and evening courses.
I also hope we can make some inroads into bringing people on and up the career ladder. The local demographic means that our students from a great range of ethnic backgrounds – in fact, our student body is one of the most diverse in the country.
The Museums Association has fought a long campaign on increasing staff diversity. The results have been encouraging, but overall, progress has been painfully slow, particularly the levels above that of the ‘shop floor’.
I hope that having heritage sector training available at the heart of the most diverse communities in the UK will offer a local and convenient stepping stone into the industry for our own graduates.
I have worked in the museum sector in one way or another for 20 years, and it still seems tricky to make the leap from, say, a gallery attendant to an archivist, a curator or an education officer – which is why I think it is important for the sector to have access to directly relevant courses that will give people a real insight into what these roles entail.
Looking to the longer term, I don’t think that our sector’s future prospects are actually so bleak. Public interest in the past seems, if anything, stronger than ever.
Museum and gallery visitor numbers are strong. And the Olympic Games are coming. Like it or not, the eyes of the world will be on the UK and thousands of visitors will surely follow. So this really isn’t a bad time for thinking about what skills we all need to help build the sector of the future.
Toby Butler is the leader of the heritage studies programme at the Raphael Samuel History Centre, University of East London
