Season’s greetings and 2025 in review

We’d like to wish a very merry Christmas and a happy new year to all our colleagues and friends in the museum sector.

We’re now taking our festive break and we’ll be back at our desks on Monday 5 January 2026.

We’ve been busy in 2025 – have a scroll to read more about what we got up to.

Campaigning

• We shared the new Code of Ethics, which passed with a 91% majority at our Annual General Meeting during our annual conference at Sain Ffagan Amgueddfa Werin Cymru – St Fagans National Museum of History, Cardiff. We will officially launch the new Code of Ethics at our free Members Together Online event on 14 January 2026.
• We made the case for the value of museums by responding to government consultations and meeting with governments across the four nations of the UK.
• We met with the Northern Ireland Executive’s Department for Communities to feed into the development of a new museum policy. Representatives from the Culture Policy Branch of the Department for Communities attended our Members Together event in Derry-Londonderry to share an update on its development.
• We launched a Manifesto for Museums in Wales and a Manifesto for Museums in Scotland to share our key asks for the new governments in these nations ahead of the elections in May 2026.
• After a joined-up advocacy campaign from the MA alongside other museum sector organisations for public investment in civic museums, the UK government announced the £20m Museum Renewal Fund to ease the financial pressures facing English civic institutions.
• Our joint sector advocacy was also successful in Scotland, where calls for new strategic public investment in museums resulted in the Scottish Government investing £4m in the Museum Futures programme to address significant challenges facing the sector.
• We published Museums Change Lives: delivering social justice with our communities, an updated exploration of the ways in which museums make us healthier and happier, proud of where we live, and inspire, motivate and challenge us. The new publication includes a range of new case studies from museums and their partners across the UK.
• We awarded £2,000 to four winning people and projects delivering socially impactful practice as part of our Museums Change Lives Awards 2025. Prizes were given to Birmingham Museum Trust for its Citizens’ Jury; Timespan (Helmsdale Heritage and Arts Society) for The People’s Mobile Archive; Horniman Museum and Gardens with partners, creatives and young people for The Great Kingdom of Benin; and Elizabeth Scott at Guildhall Art Gallery.
• We appointed Kinvara Jardine Paterson, education director at Project Everyone, as our new climate champion trustee. Members of the MA Climate Justice Steering Group published thought provoking blog posts on interconnecting nature with climate justice and using archives to understand our changing rivers and the environment. We also shared new climate justice case studies from Manchester Museum, Natural History Museum, Ulster Museum and Perth Museum which showcase how museums can be bold and brave in putting forward a systems change approach on climate justice.
• We published a new series of case studies in support of our Learning and Engagement Manifesto, featuring work on activism, community participation, research and beyond from Showtown Blackpool, Lisburn Museum, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Museum of Homelessness, The Scottish Crannog Centre, Dundee Heritage Trust, Royal Armouries Museum and National Museums Liverpool.
• We continued our Anti-racist Museums Programme into its second year, announcing the 2025 cohort of six museums (Horniman Museum and Gardens, Museum of Watford, North East Museums, Royal Museums Greenwich, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Thackray Museum of Medicine) who will come together for workshops, action learning and coaching through to April 2026. This initiative is part of the MA’s long-term commitment to dismantling racism in UK museums.
• We called for evidence for Revisiting Empowering Collections 2025, the forthcoming review and update of our 2019 Empowering Collections report which called for museums, funders and policy-makers to work together to ensure that museum collections are empowering, relevant and dynamic.

Funding

• We awarded seven grants totalling almost £700k through the Esmée Fairbairn Communities and Collections Fund. The Whithorn Trust, Manchester Jewish Museum and Nairn Museum received core grants to support organisational goals around diversity, equity and inclusion using their collections. Durham University Museum, the National Coal Mining Museum for England and the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge will work equitably with community partners on projects using collections using partnership funding. The National Maritime Museum and the National Windrush Museum will use their partnership grant to work together to achieve shared goals though participatory work with the community. We have also published new guidance to support working equitably with community partners and creating a culture of care to support this work.
• From 39 full applications, we awarded nine grants totalling over £650K through our new Health and Wellbeing in Museums Fund thanks to support from the Julia Rausing Trust. The Beaney, Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service, Hampshire Cultural Trust, the Holburne Museum, the Horniman Museum and Gardens, the Museum of Homelessness, the Amelia Scott, the Whitworth and Your Trust will use funding the develop and continue their groundbreaking health and wellbeing programmes.
• We awarded 235 fully-funded inclusive memberships through our Members Support Fund to individuals with protected characteristics who face barriers in the workforce. The fund also supported inclusive event places, helping MA members attend our one-day events and annual conference for free.
• We published a series of filmed and written case studies reflecting on the projects funded by Mindsets + Missions for Museums and Science Centres of the Future (M+M), which ran during 2023 and 2024. M+M was a pilot learning and grants programme funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to support museums and science centres to engage underrepresented groups with knowledge, research and innovation.

Careers and professional development

• We launched our first inclusive Fellowship of the Museums Association (FMA) programme, welcoming seven new Fellows in waiting, and the second inclusive Associateship of the Museums Association (AMA) programme, where we welcomed 12 new AMA candidates. This supports our commitment to diversifying the sector by fully funding professional development programme places for individuals who have experienced barriers to progression.
• We welcomed more than 60 new AMA candidates and 10 new FMA candidates onto their programmes, and supported the first ever Fast Track AMA programme – which saw 14 candidates embark on an accelerated 12-month development journey.
• We awarded one new Fellowship and 20 new Associateships at this year’s conference, taking this opportunity to celebrate their success.
• Members of the 2025 Mentoring for All cohort reach the end of their journeys this month, with 14 mentoring pairs finishing the programme having developed confidence, competence and connections. 20 new pairs are waiting to start the programme in January as part of the third Mentoring for All cohort.
• More than 80 Career Conversations have taken place online and at our Members Together events in person, with MA members taking the opportunity to explore their career journeys in a safe and supportive space.
• We went from strength to strength across our professional development and careers programmes this year, which was achieved with the generosity of our members in the sector – more than 150 volunteers supported mentoring, assessing and professional reviews, and we’d like to thank each and every one.

Spotlight: Conference 2025

We hosted Conference 2025: Perthyn – Belonging in October at Sain Ffagan Amgueddfa Werin Cymru – St Fagans National Museum of History. The open-air museum welcomed 862 people through its doors for the three-day event, with a further 654 people watching sessions online.

We hosted social events and tours across Cardiff and South Wales, exploring the best of Wales’s cultural offering, including its food, language, music and art. St Fagans proved to be a brilliant place to host a conference, as did Cardiff itself, with its fantastic range of hotels, restaurants and cultural venues. We are looking forward to returning to Wales for future MA events.

Our event was supported by funding from Welsh government.

Events

• We enjoyed a great turnout to our events in 2025, with a total of 4,258 people attending our events this year.
• We held 10 one-day conferences on topics such as collections management, copyright and facilities management, with 1,645 delegates attending both in person and online.
• We met 390 MA members at our free in-person events in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales where we discussed everything from the Code of Ethics and Empowering Collections to the future of temporary exhibitions.
• We hosted topical discussions on issues such as how museums can foster inclusivity and challenge racism, wellbeing and climate justice at our series of free online events for MA members – with 756 individual, institutional and commercial members taking part.

Online news

• Museums Journal’s biggest news stories of 2025 reflect a rollercoaster year – there were major highs, with particular excitement over the news that the Bayeux Tapestry would be returning to England next year.
• There was also a much-needed boost for civic museums in England and Scotland, with the announcement of new, targeted funding streams. Welsh museums and culture also received an uplift after significant cuts in 2024.
• In March, a parliamentary report kicked off a much-needed discussion on the care and treatment of human remains held in museum collections, an issue that is likely to be the subject of much more debate in the coming years.
• Coming at the tail end of the year, the independent review of Arts Council England featured a number of hugely significant recommendations for England’s museum sector.
• It was a difficult year for many institutions, with several much-loved museums closing due to loss of funding or spiralling costs, including the Museum of Cannock Chase and the River & Rowing Museum.
• The international news story of the year was undoubtedly the shocking thefts from the Louvre, which exposed serious flaws in the museum’s security and maintenance arrangements.
• Theft is also a growing concern closer to home, with burglaries at the St Fagans National History Museum in Cardiff, the Empire and Commonwealth Collections at Bristol City Council, and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, among others.
• Changing trends in audience behaviour and expectations were also high on the agenda this year, with new research highlighting the transformed landscape for temporary exhibitions and the growing competition from ‘slick’ digital experiences, as well as the announcement of a major research project exploring inequalities in visitor engagement.

Museums Journal

• Our bimonthly magazine covered a wide variety of topics this year. One of the highlights was our Europe after empire special issue, guest edited by journalist and academic Gary Younge.
• Other features looked at caring for vulnerable heritage sites, how museums are reimagining the visitor welcome, addressing the silence of women in art, and the museums hoping to transform north Wales.
• Our In Practice section explored designing accessible exhibitions, taking a strategic approach to career planning, museum rebrands and leaning in to the repatriation process.
• In our analysis section we looked at the evolving debate around ethical sponsorship, what the nationals’ new facilities tell us about the future of storage, whether the culture wars are having an impact on repatriation, and the pros and cons of AI in museums.
• Our reviews section covered 2025’s major museum openings, including the ambitious restoration of Norwich Castle Keep, Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery and the Natural History Museum’s new permanent climate exhibition, Fixing Our Broken Planet.
• We also launched the first two episodes in the third series of our Radical Museums podcast, where we caught up with William Mitchell, project director for the Action for Community Transformation (ACT) Initiative in Belfast, and E-J Scott, founder of the Museum of Transology.

Membership

• Individual membership grew again this year to 11,370, with more than 3,000 new members.
• We’re proud of our support for members and always enjoy meeting them across the UK at our own events (including seven free Members Together events with almost 1,000 members), sector conferences and meetings, careers days for students and beyond.
• We welcomed a new cohort of 15 member representatives who have been working hard to engage with members in the four nations and all regions of England, hosting local meet-ups and online meetings for colleagues in their area.
• We continued to expand our digital reach, with our LinkedIn following increasing from 92,000 to 114,000 from January to December, and our website reaching 922,000 users across the globe. We also deliver two newsletters to our 56,000 subscribers each week.
• We ran special offers on eight occasions, with discounts of up to 25% off the price of a new membership.

Thank you all for learning, engaging and growing with us in 2025. We’re looking forward to building on all this year’s important work when we return to our desks in January.