School trips to museums tend to leave an impression, don’t they? Whether it’s awe at being transported into the city, wonder at the incredible realism of the marble sculptures, or maybe just the horror of your classmate getting sick on the coach somewhere on the M25, trips open pupils up to experiences that they could never have had at school. And when trips were halted abruptly as a result of pandemic lockdowns and restrictions, pupils missed out on those diverse experiences.

While schemes such as Leeds Museums and Galleries’ (LMG) Closing the Covid Gap project have gone some way towards making up for this loss - in this initiative, LMG worked with 18 Leeds schools, helping them to redesign their curricula to suit digital learning through workshops, videos and Covid-secure object loans from the collection - many would argue there is no substitute for the real thing.

Studies have shown that museum trips help to build students’ “cultural capital”, a quality defined by Ofsted as “the essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement”.

Strong cultural capital has been linked to better educational attainment and an economically and socially stable life. Indeed, developing cultural capital is a requirement of the current Ofsted framework.

But there are also broader emotional and social benefits that come from museum trips, says Heather King, reader in science education at King’s College London. She researches museum-based teaching and learning programmes and was involved in setting up My Primary School is at the Museum, a trialled project that has placed around 500 primary, nursery and preschool children into museums, galleries and botanic gardens for up to 11 weeks at a time.

King points to research and case study evidence showing that museum visits can help children to develop empathy and their sense of identity, while also strengthening relationships between teachers and pupils.

The benefits are clear, and yet the school museum trip is a relatively new phenomenon, says Matthew Grenby, professor of 18th-century studies at Newcastle University, who is working on a book on the relationship between children and heritage.

He points out that the recent Covid lockdowns were not the first time that children had been unable to access cultural education. In fact, it was only towards the end of the 19th century that the value of trips to museums and heritage sites began to gain recognition - before this, children were often discouraged and sometimes effectively banned from visiting cultural institutions.

The shift to museums welcoming children was, in part, thanks to the philanthropist Thomas Horsfall. In 1877, he founded the now defunct Manchester Art Museum as an educational venture, explains Grenby. Legislative change followed soon after.

“In 1895, an amendment of the National Day School Code permitted schoolchildren to visit museums and galleries in school hours as part of their education,” he says. “From then, school trips gathered momentum.”

The First World War was also influential in opening up access to museums for young people, Grenby adds.

“In places like Manchester, school buildings were requisitioned as hospitals, meaning that pupils took part in a shift system, with half of them educated outside the school premises at any time and then swapping with the other half. Museums - along with zoos, cinemas and swimming pools - could offer a space for non-school-based teaching,” he says.

While it’s true to say that, today, most museums have children firmly in mind, King counters that barriers to access still exist - for example, museums can still be “exclusionary places if you’re not white and middle class”, she says.

Most of the Covid-related restrictions on school trips have now been lifted, but teachers will still need to consider these other barriers when it comes to planning a museum trip. So, what are they?

One obstacle for teachers to be aware of is a barrier around language, suggests King. “Exhibitions may be decades old and because of that [information may only be conveyed] in English,” she says. “It’s hard, but technology is increasingly allowing us to offer interpretation in the array of languages [spoken in the UK]. I’m sure museums will catch up but there seems to be a time lag at the moment.”

Yet this issue isn’t insurmountable, says Jonathan Mountstevens, deputy head and history teacher at Beaumont School, a secondary in St Albans, Hertfordshire. Much of his experience of taking students to museums has been overseas, where there is no guarantee that any information will be presented in English.“I think that the best solution is for museum visits to be deliberately and explicitly built into the curriculum, so that lessons beforehand prepare students for the visit and lessons afterwards include review,” he says.

Mountstevens suggests providing students with “tailor-made booklets to focus their experience”. This way, he explains, “students can be prepared and enter the museum armed with knowledge of what is there, what they are looking for and how it fits into their learning [regardless of language]”.

But as well as the language barrier, there may also be cultural hurdles for students to navigate, points out King: “[For example,] information may also be presented from a ‘white saviour’ perspective.” While “many museums will be aware of it and will try to change that”, she adds, teachers still need to build learning about such issues into the work they do in preparation for a visit, and in any lessons following the trip.

According to Mountstevens, the best approach here may be to flip the issue on its head and “take advantage” of it, by placing “the museum’s perspective front and centre in students’ learning”.

He gives the example of museums based around the Normandy battlefields, which “tend to recount a familiar narrative of the heroism of the western Allies”.

“I have always tried to make a virtue of this by problematising the interpretation and framing the enquiry around it,” he explains. “Students then ask why this narrative is so prevalent at these museums and gain an important insight into the process of historical commemoration and the heritage industry.”

So, advance preparation is key to overcoming language and cultural barriers, and the same goes for another common barrier to access: the norms of behaviour expected in museums. “Are you allowed to touch or not? Are you allowed to ask or not? What’s expected in this place? Are you allowed to run? Are you allowed to be noisy? It can be hard [for children and young people] to distinguish between science centres, which can be very hands-on, and more traditional museums. It all depends on the rules. If you’ve grown up going to museums, you might know what’s expected, but if you haven’t, it can feel alien and threatening,” says King.

For Mountstevens, there is no substitute here for making expectations clear to students ahead of the visit. “I like to narrate what is going to happen in advance. For example, there will be a guide who may have a strong accent, but we will listen very respectfully, even if we find it hard to understand, applaud at the end and ask me if we are confused when we are back on the coach,” he says.

“Do not assume children will magically know what it means to act as ambassadors for the school,” he continues. “[You have to] tell them exactly what this looks like, make it a shared endeavour and praise them for it afterwards. This process of learning to adapt to different social situations is one of the great benefits of museum visits.”

For students with SEND, of course, there may be specific challenges around access in addition to those listed above. In this case, contacting the museum ahead of time will be essential, as schools and education teams at cultural institutions are used to catering to such requirements. The British Museum, for instance, offers “a wide range of facilities to support students with access needs (visual, hearing, learning and mobility)”.

Ultimately, despite the obstacles that still exist, King believes that out-of-classroom learning is a crucial part of pupils’ school experience - and for that reason it will always be worth making the effort to overcome the access barriers, Covid-related or not.

“If a learner is in one environment, just in school, and doesn’t participate in learning in any out-of-school context, whether at home or in the community, their [learning] base isn’t nearly as rich and secure. Whereas if they’ve got experiences from outside the classroom, through museum trips, library visits, trips to industry, this is all part of a rich learning ecology,” she says.

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 12 November 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Museum trips”