Audience development

A training programme has been launched as part of efforts to make the heritage and culture sector a more welcoming place for teenagers.

The free I’m A Teenager… Get Me Into There! programme from Wigan-based cultural education charity Curious Minds is aimed at staff and volunteers, particularly those who deal directly with the public.

Created in response to research that suggests teenagers often feel unwelcome in venues such as museums and galleries, the programme has been designed to make staff more confident in their dealings with young people.

Kelly Allen, Executive Director of Social Justice at Curious Minds, said: "Experience has shown us that every single adult interaction really matters to young people, especially when they’re doing something that’s new to them. 

“It also affects their willingness to engage with that artform elsewhere, so the responsibility to get it right is huge.”

The course can be accessed in three ways: online by downloading a teaching pack to run activities with staff/volunteers; or as a tailored, in-person version for venues, facilitated by Curious Minds staff.

The I'm A Teenager... programme began life as a partnership with national youth charity UFA and the Lancashire Library and Museums Service.

The latest version was developed as part of Curious Minds’ Hope Streets initiative, working with five museum partners across the North West of England.

The number of people visiting DCMS-sponsored institutions from outside the UK showed slow signs of recovery last year, according to new figures released by the department.

Between April 2021 and March 2022, there were an estimated 1.3m overseas visitors to DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries.

The number is nearly 23 times higher than the previous year, when there were just 54,000 visits from people living outside the UK, largely due to lockdown restrictions.

But the number of overseas visitors remains 94% down on the last financial year unaffected by the pandemic, when 22.7m visited DCMS-sponsored sites in 2018/19. 

Museums and galleries supported by DCMS include the British Museum, Imperial War Museums, National Museums Liverpool, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum Group and the Tate Gallery Group.

The department says the current trend largely mirrors the decrease in overseas visitors to the UK since the pandemic.

Tate is taking its national art collection on the road in a new initiative with the French organisation Art Explora.

The new 'mobile museum' is in the trailer of an articulated lorry and is currently on a 10-week tour (until 29 April) of Liverpool and the surrounding area.

The pilot scheme is touring a slimmed-down version of the Radical Landscapes exhibition held at Tate Liverpool last summer.

As well as locations in Liverpool it will go to St Helens, Knowsley, the Wirral and Halton.

Helen Legg, the director of Tate Liverpool, said it was hoped the project will "arrest issues of attendance at our national museums”.

She added: “The mobile museum is unique. It goes directly into communities. It allows us, as a museum, to meet people on their own terms.” 

The non-profit project is supported by Art Explora with public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

A number of historic heritage sites across England saw record increases in visitor numbers in 2022, according to figures from English Heritage.

The charity said its historic sites had a “bumper year”, with nine having their best year on record, including Corbridge Roman Town in Northumberland, Okehampton Castle in Devon and Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire.

Other sites, including North Yorkshire’s Pickering Castle and Richmond Castle, and Aldborough Roman Site in York, had their best year for visitor numbers this century.

The charity says the positive numbers were driven by domestic tourism returning to “full strength” last year, despite the number of international visitors remaining at 70% of pre-pandemic levels.

Membership to English Heritage was also at its highest ever level in 2022, totalling 1.2m.

Chief Executive Kate Mavor said the findings are “a clear indication that homegrown tourism is flourishing once again.”

“We know that the public took advantage of the pandemic’s ‘stay at home’ mandate to rediscover the heritage on their doorstep and this newfound enthusiasm for history and culture has shown no sign of diminishing over the ensuing year,” Mavor added.

The National Science and Media Museum in Bradford has announced details of a £6m refurbishment project that will see it closed to the public for a year from June.

The “radical, once-in-a-generation” work will create two new "object-rich" galleries that will draw on the museum's diverse collection of 3.2 million objects.

Exhibits at the venue, which is part of the Science Museum group, range from the first photographic negative to the original puppet of Zippy from the 1970s kids TV show, Rainbow.

National Science and Media Museum director Jo Quinton-Tulloch said: “It is a fantastic moment for the museum. We are going to be transforming the visitor offer and it will be here for decades to come."

The refurbishment will remodel two floors and open up unused spaces in order to reimagine “the display and interpretation of the core collections”.

Quinton-Tulloch added that the changes, which will also include a new liftand improvements to the entrance, will allow the museum to “welcome many more visitors”.

Work will begin from February, prior to the closure, with displays on levels three and five of the building being gradually removed.

Museums should spend more time exploring issues of inequality and class differences in society, a report has suggested.

The study, conducted by Kings College London and the Museum of London, found that while attention has increasingly been devoted to issues around diversity in recent years - including race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender - issues around class have not recieved the same exposue.

The report calls for museums to address the the topic of socio-economic issues “not only through dedicated public programmes, curatorial projects and exhibition displays but also through more wide organisational change".

“We urge museums of every kind to embrace their social responsibility in this area, and come up with imaginative and institutionally relevant ways to address working-class stories drawing on the distinctive opportunities afforded by their collection, institutional history, locality and current and potential audiences,” the report, funded by Arts Council England, states.

A panel discussion to coincide with the launch of the report is due to be held on Wednesday (11 January).