If your collection isn't special, then neither are you!

This week saw the launch of ACE's long awaited companion document to Great Art for Everyone, Culture, Knowledge and Understanding: Great Museums and Libraries for Everyone. ACE was keen to show from very early on that, although not having the complete skill set and background information on museums and libraries, it was willing to learn and adapt, the culmination of this courting of the sectors was finalised in Estelle Morris's Strategic Framework Review of the Great Art for Everyone vision paper for arts to support the creation of the companion document and subsequent funding arrangements for the next three years.

Baroness Morris's report was well researched, and helped move the attention away from the poorly thought through 'core museums' which the sinking MLA wanted to leave as a parting gift and towards a system of museum and library development that used the last 10-15 years of development as a soapbox of advocacy and synergy within the wider cultural world. Morris's report through out words such as harmonisation, excellence, significance of contributions and public at the centre of what we do. A spark of hope at a juncture of despair? Possibly...

...But then again possibly not. In all 26 pages of Morris's report, designation is mentioned once, in the entire document visitor figures as a measure of success is neither mentioned nor inferred, and scholarship is referred to as an aside, not as a core component of any or all museums remits or missions. Yet, in the Renaissance Major Grants Programme, which has been compared to the open and competitive National Portfolio Organisations programme which ACE completed earlier in the year, these areas seem to be the cornerstones of application and success!?!

The grants programme, which largely replaces the former hub programmes, is not competitive in the same way that the earlier 'open to all' NPO programme was for arts organisations. For some unknown reason ACE has decided from the start that excellence means designated collections; again, I refer you to the one, single reference to this in Morris's report, which said:

The national schemes, such as the Accreditation Scheme and the Designation Scheme, help to drive excellence

Help, the key word here is 'help' not 'is', not 'must be', but help - a method that has helped to identify some collections of importance (to whom is another matter). Straight away a museum that supports its local communities identity, provides excellent educational services, is inspirational in the way it manages governance and trustees, the museum that has been nominated time and time again as family friendly, the service that puts the community at the heart of what it does, they are all not excellent according to ACE's own words, they are merely 'museums'. Strangely enough this must be the sort of difficult build up of trust that Morris refers to in the sentence prior to her single mention of designation!

But, let’s be realistic, for the lay person designation must be pretty much common place amongst museums? There may be the 'odd' museum in the back end of beyond that has a few 'bits and bobs' collected over time that really is just a stop off point between places of interest, and at the end of the day, what can they share with their neighbours. Well, you would like to think so wouldn't you? But you're wrong. Time for some facts and figures.

I'll be using the South East as my example as this is my region and I know it best, but all of this likely applies to similar extents across the country. In the South East there are just over 200 individually, fully accredited, museums and galleries, of which less than 10% are eligible to apply under the major grants scheme! In total, 15 museums 'could' be eligible to apply as they have designated collections (I say could). Let’s zoom in a little bit and get a bit closer to home for me. Kent. Kent has one of largest numbers of museums and galleries (by county) across the country, yet only one museum could be eligible to apply for the major grants scheme.

One museum in the whole county. A third of the South East's region. But, that's not the whole story, of that one museum who could represent the county as a flagship, excellent museum, it falls short of another 'basic' requirement, it doesn't exceed the minimum visitor figures of 150,000/year. Oh well, better luck next time Kent.

Back to our South East example, so we've lost Kent (you may be the Garden of England, but you're not an excellent museum county), but what of our other 14 contenders, well, lets check our new requirement of 150,000 visitors [insert drum roll] we've lost a further four (sorry guys, however you are sort of excellent). So for the South East we're down to 10 museums, or 5% of the accredited collective. Well, it's better than five I suppose! Ops, no it isn't as actually if you collect the museums under their parent organisations, then we actually have five individual services or museums who could apply for the major grants scheme. So that's only one more than the South East had as its hub museums, of which two of the five services were former hubs...hmmm

Ok, so the ACE loyalists will no doubt say, but this is only one of the grant schemes we'll deliver, and it is similar to the old hubs funding anyway... well, it's a point, maybe not a great point, but it has merit I suppose. On that point I agree, but it sets the tone and the direction in which museums must travel, which seems to be more people and designated collections - for the museum in Kent that has a wonderful collection of objects, cared for by volunteers, loved by its community, a star for its schools, and with a board of trustees to be envied, what does this new scheme and alignment mean for them? Ace has set itself up as the defender of excellence, the guarantor of competitive award, and for me the rest of its document becomes an aside from this core development desire of more people to greater collections, regardless of achievements in other areas.

As MLA was being disbanded, our Renaissance team carried out a pretty thorough analysis of where the South East museums were and what they expected/hoped for from the ACE merger. All Change Please! shows that 'smaller' museums can offer a lot, and when it comes to being leading lights in managing governance most local authority museums could learn a lot, and that is just the sort of 'excellence' that I think should be encouraged.

But, of our five contenders we have a Local Authority, University, Independent and sort of 'facility based' (Mary Rose Trust) museum representation, should the critics of this piece decide to check! But is this the point? Why has ACE made the leap that excellence is inherently linked to collections importance - and who should a collection be important to?

Excellence for me should be related strongly to the collections, but as Morris states in her report:

Underpinning all this has to be a commitment to excellence in all its forms; whether it be excellent collections or performance; excellence in community engagement or education; excellence in advocacy or representation, audience development or public engagement; or excellence in creativity or self expression.

Obviously Morris's report didn't guide ACE to that decision then? Her report states that having an excellent collection is only one part of the excellence framework, although through ACE eyes it is the 'cut off' between recognition and the need for development. Over the next few years I imagine ACE will become inundated with museums and galleries desperate to have a part of their collection recognised as excellent. What ACE has perhaps confused is that we already have accreditation: this is the method of defining whether a museum is excellent at what it does and plans to do (which includes collections) and not excellence as ACE has defined as museums being an art form where excellence is measured by award and stature. I hope over time this can and will be rectified and ACE talk with the wider museums community about what we really have to offer and really want to be 'known' for.

(Thanks to Mar Dixon for encouraging me to write this while I was feeling passionate about the subject rather than a potentially watered down, diplomatic response in a few days time!)

Could nationals offer a new way of delivering a renaissance in the regions?

Tristram Hunt's piece in The Guardian on the increasing polarisation of the free national to the charged local museum is a talking point I have been interested in seeing aired since the coalition took power and stated that free national museum would remain a priority (albeit an increasingly smaller number) during the term of the government.

In principle, the idea of free national museums is a good one - make the museum free, and more people will come, which means more people are enlightened by the museum experience and their associated value and worth: great!  But not great if this doesn't work.  Tristram's piece shows that the audience profile for nationals hasn't changed substantially, so has offered greater access to already engaged audiences - hmm, the free museum starts to read like a middle class subsidy, ek!

At the same time, when schools are faced with the challenge of deciding which cultural venues to visit, and with a coach not costing much more for a day hire to London than down the road to the local museum, the national is a much easier sell to the parents (who are already digging deep into their pockets for these trips) with the 'wow factor' of a trip to the British Museum or V&A.  In essence the extra cost of the coach can be covered through the repositioning of the free entry national against the charged entry at the local museum.

This is not to say that people don't visit local museums, and schools can't be persuaded to use their local museum and local collections over that of a national, but that in itself comes at a cost - outreach, education, marketing and freelance staff all brought into post to herd the local masses through the local rather than national door.

So, what does the above have to do with the post title?

Well, for one, with the demise of the MLA, and an uncertain future for museum development under the ACE model being developed, it feels the time is right for museums to begin to muster themselves and at least present a new model and way of working - in partnership - to support the continued development of the sector (and importantly the sustainability of the sector).

Whilst I agree in principle with what Tristram has written, I do still feel that there is more to the argument that just adding a charge onto nationals: how can a charge, balanced with a reduced government grant, be used to support regional museum development?  For me, the ideal world would be a form of commissioning model between the nationals and the regions, in other words, becoming the 'core' museums that for many, the hubs never were.

My vision of a national commissioning model would look something like this:
Charge for national entry (a fiver sounds fair, as Tristram suggests)
Still apply a government grant at 50% of current levels
Apply a 'thresehold' at which any money over and above that thresehold, generated through admissions, is put into a national development fund
Create a set of commissioning themes (possibly aligned to the Generic Social Outcomes model)
Use the fund to allow (non national) museums to apply for grants to support strategic, nationally agreed, development agendas, or other agreed outcomes
Develop and sustain the sector

This process puts the onus on nationals to be a leading and guiding hand in supporting the national development and sustainability of the sector, it weans nationals of the government purse, slightly, and puts an emphasis on museums to develop along structured, nationally agreed routes, which can't be bad for all involved, can it?

At the heart of this vision, is the idea that whilst the MLA was and is an important organisation for museums across the country, it could be argued that its failing was that it could never pull the sector together as a whole, as the hubs were tasked with achieving, as they were never commissioners but more mediators and leaders of the sector (not for).

So to finish this off, the maintaining of nationals as free institutions puts all other museums - especially those within a certain radius of a national - on the back foot, unable to become entrepreneurial organisations that central government so desires, and at the same time, losing the 'saftey net' that the MLA provided in terms of strategic direction and resource.  So, could nationals offer a new way of delivering a renaissance in the regions?  This writer thinks so, if a little difficult on the palate for many to begin with...