Art Assembly 2019. Walthamstow © David Levene 2019

If you are a member of the GEM Jiscmail list you will know it has many intriguing, useful and occasionally downright strange threads on museum learning (my favourite has to be the 2003 extended Friday afternoon discussion on sterilising toilet roll centres for workshops). You will also have observed that there are frequent posts all asking a version of the question ‘How do I contact teachers?’.

Teachers are highly influential in the lives of pupils everywhere in the UK. Thanks to the generous support of the Clore Duffield Foundation, over the 2021-22 school year at Art Fund we set out to work with teachers to research what support they needed to use museums and galleries more often as resources in their teaching, for the benefit of themselves and their pupils. Unintentionally, we also ended up getting answers to the question ‘How do I contact teachers’ and wanted to share this with museum learning teams.

Art Fund have created a you can download with detailed information from the Teacher Art Pass research.

It is not that teachers lack interest in museums, in fact 94% of our TAP teachers believe museums are places of inspiration and learning, contributing to the wellbeing of themselves and their pupils. The barriers to teachers responding to you are time and money pressures, which we found are particularly acute in England.

The TAP research suggested different approaches we detail below you might like to try if you have capacity, but Art Fund is very aware that like in schools, museums are equally constrained by time and money pressures.

Who were the Teacher Art Pass teachers?

Before I start sharing the research a few caveats; we worked hard to recruit teachers from across all the home nations and to recruit a spread of teachers working in Primary, Secondary, Special and PRUs., but did not hit our targets for Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland teachers. Instead we supplemented this research with focus groups and interviews with teachers from Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. We also ran a Teacher Tapp survey with 6,000 teachers in England to check some of our findings.

All the Teacher Art Pass (TAP) teachers came from schools with 16% or more children receiving free school meals to focus on children experiencing disadvantage as we know those are the children least likely to have good access to museums. 60% of the teachers were Art & Design teachers or leads in Primary schools.

Five lessons learnt from the Teacher Art Pass research

  1. Most teachers probably know less about museums than you think

I was surprised to discover how few teachers felt able to physically find museums and how many had no idea what type of services museums offer. We had teachers suggesting a good thing for museums to do would be to offer school workshops, resources or Continuing Professional Development (CPD).  I found the level of awareness of museum learning services low, and it made me realise I had assumed much greater prior knowledge about museums than teachers have

2. Barriers to schools visiting museums are cost + time

Teachers talked about the barriers to using museums, which boil down to cost and time. The cost of transport to get pupils to museums is frequently prohibitive. Being able to walk to a museum makes a big different in how likely it is a teacher can get permission for a visit. Time to plan and organise a visit is also a big barrier. One teacher told us:

 I am 30 mins away from TATE Britain but going on a free gallery trip takes up to 6hrs to plan, including sending letters home and chasing permission slips, permission from management, risk assessment, collecting health info, cancelling school dinners, checking students have travel passes and packed lunches etc. I have 1 and a half hours per week planning time for all my classes.

Museums do not have any control over how much planning time a teacher has or the cost of transport, but what we can control is how we provide information to teachers.

Teachers need to be able to quickly find your museum online (half do a google search when trying to find a museum to visit) and then once on your website teachers need to quickly find information about school visits.

It is worth checking how easy it is to find information about school visits and any resources on your website. If a teacher cannot quickly find information, they will move on to another google result.

3. Key information to provide to teachers

The information that the Teacher Art Pass (TAP) teachers and those we spoke to in focus groups are looking for is:

  • The areas of the curriculum you museum supports
  • Cost of visits, including any workshops or tours you offer
  • Instructions on how to book a school group visit
  • Museum education team contact information
  • Pro forma risk assessment
  • Recommended length of trip or size of exhibition
  • Facilities e.g. lunchroom, toilets, cafe, access

Teachers cautioned us not to over claim what a museum could deliver for their subject. Science teachers talked about how a museum has to be able to deliver the curriculum better than they can do it in their classroom for them to consider a visit.

4. Channels to communicate with teachers: emails, social media and Facebook

In our TAP surveys email newsletters were highest ranked for museums communicating with teachers, with 72% of teachers saying they used them. The next most used medium was social media with 54% of TAP teachers using. One surprise from the research was how well used teacher Facebook groups are. Half of TAP teachers belong to one.

5. Build networks to communicate through

I worked with the marketing team at Art Fund on the TAP project. It was a revelation seeing communications with teachers through their lens. Key lessons I have taken away from the experience are:

  • Plan at the start of projects how you will share information, it can’t be an add on later once you have already created the workshop or project.
  • Pare down the number of words you use. Do not include details in the first contact – you can add that when you build relationships with teachers, or you can direct people to the information on your website.
  • And most importantly, if you can build a community or network first with teachers and then communicate with them. They will then proactively read what you send. People read information from people they have relationships with.

If you have marketing expertise in your organisation make sure you are using it when contacting teachers.

The Great Escape – a project for museums to help build networks

Art Fund has taken what we learnt from running the Teacher Art Pass R&D year and applied it to their new project The Great Escape, a mass participation project across the UK, creatively responding to art, climate change and biodiversity loss on an unprecedented scale, leading up to Earth Day 2023.  Children, schools and families are invited to visit a local museum, gallery or historic house, find an image of an animal and imagine its escape to a future habitat with greater biodiversity.

TAP has demonstrated that giving teachers more access to museums increases their use of museums in their teaching and their pupils’ access. The Great Escape will embed the TAP research about how to communicate with teachers in the guidance and resources Art Fund shares, and it will provide grants for museums to run Great Escape projects so museum, gallery and historic house learning colleagues implement the lessons learnt. Who knows, it may also result in some strangely wonderful GEM Jiscmail threads on animals’ escapes as well.

Sam Cairns, Director, Sam Cairns Associates and Consultant on Art Fund’s Teacher Art Pass

Sam has worked in the cultural sector for over 20 years – starting in museum education and then working in libraries, archives and the arts. She ran the Cultural Learning Alliance 2011-22 and led the development of the Cultural Learning Alliance’s Key Research Findings: the case for cultural learning (2017) and authored the most read CLA blog: What is Cultural Capital? Sam project managed and compiled Space for Learning: a new handbook for creating inspirational learning spaces (2015) and Space for Learning Covid Guidance (2020). She was Project Manager of RSA Learning About Culture for a year in 2019 and is working with Art Fund on their Teacher Art Pass R&D Year and The Great Escape project. She is a member of the Artsmark Assessment Panel, a Heritage Fund mentor and a primary school governor.