Introduction

In recent years there has been an increasing impetus for museums, heritage sites and galleries to provide education and learning experiences for an ever-widening audience. Political initiatives, including social inclusion and lifelong learning, have been built into development plans and funding criteria to such an extent that many larger institutions now employ Education and Outreach Officers.

Smaller museums are not expected to employ education officers, but are being encouraged to use their collective resources by as wide an audience as possible including schools, families and community groups. Small museums carry a wealth of experience and knowledge, often with a particularly local flavour, but also covering specialist areas of history and science. Their reliance on volunteers and problems with limited resources, including time, means that their valuable collections are still often under-used.

This section of the Porthcurno website has been funded by South West Museums Libraries and Archives Council to provide a ‘Best Practice’ source of information and can be used as a template for producing a museum education programme. It has been produced in response to the experience of setting up education programmes from scratch in three small to moderate sized museums in the west of Cornwall and also utilises previous museum education experience in larger institutions. For the purposes of brevity, references to ‘museums’ on this site also refers to art galleries and heritage sites.

There are some things that you will HAVE to do if you want to have children working and learning in your museum. There are other things that are not essential but are advisable or potentially useful. You will have to carry out risk assessments on all activities that you plan as well as on the building and/or site that you will be using. You will also be required by law to have all people working directly with children to have Police Disclosure checks. A Child Protection Policy is currently advisable and will in due course become a legal obligation, while a Disability Access Policy will show how you are attempting to fulfil the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act. An Education Policy is not an essential, but it can be a useful aid when you try to get support from funding bodies.

Not everything will be relevant to every site, but anything which you think will help you to deliver learning opportunities in a more efficient and effective way can be downloaded, altered and reproduced to suit your needs.

What is Museum Education?

A photograph of five children in the museum gallery.

Image: Children enjoying a museum visit.

There are various educational resources that museums and galleries can provide for schools and other groups. However, most museums do not provide all these facilities – only those that are relevant to their site or those that their collection can support. These facilities will include:

1) Museum visits with either human or documentary support
2) Organised workshops
3) Age-relevant interpretation within the museum
4) Teachers/group leaders background information packs
5) Loans boxes of artefacts that can be used independently in school
6) Packs of documents to illustrate a narrative – photos & archive
7) Outreach visits to give illustrated talks or workshop sessions
8) Special projects using outside specialists – artists, poets, etc
9) Website
10) CD’s

While there will probably be other groups occasionally using your site for educational purpose – Scouts, Guides, Cadets, youth clubs, etc – your main customer base will be school groups and as such you must prepare your project with teachers and pupils in mind. You will find, however, that if you develop a programme of provision suitable for a range of school age groups, the same material will be appropriate for other groups, even for adults, with a little modification.

Teachers using museum facilities will normally approach you with an idea of what they want but will expect you to be able to provide experiences that will allow them to deliver the requirements and outcomes of the National Curriculum. Remember that each unit of work is allocated a certain number of teaching hours – maybe 10 or 12 spread out over a term. If they bring a class out to visit you they are using up possibly half of that time in one go so it has to be very relevant to what they are doing in the classroom.

Similarly, any documentary material, photographs, loan artefacts, teachers’ pack material, etc has to be relevant to their school project. For this reason it is as well to be aware of the topics suggested for the National Curriculum and how the curriculum itself works.

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