Top tips for great visits
These notes apply equally whether you are visiting a museum or museum staff are visiting you!
Ask the museum to send you a brochure about their education services for schools or look at their website. This will help answer some of your initial questions. If you need to ask more, ring up and ask.
Always visit a museum before the trip to get a feel for what's there and to help with your risk assessment of the trip. Some museums will provide free pre-visits for teachers or twilight sessions. Ask about them. Bring parents and other adults who are coming on the visit if you can.
Choose your museum carefully. Most museums can usually cover a few subjects very well, but because of their collections, they will not usually cover everything on the National Curriculum. For example, RAMM does not provide a workshop on the Vikings because we have virtually no Viking collections. Leading on from this, think about the way you teach your subjects carefully. It is probably worth crafting your teaching plans around the strength of local resources, rather than battling with something which has no local relevance, connections or resources.
If there is an INSET day on the museum's services, attend one if you can.
Market the trip or visit to parents and governors. Ask the museum to write a letter to them explaining why it will be worth the while to organise it.
Book at least a term in advance or whatever the museum recommends. Museums with good services usually get booked up well in advance.
Get the booking confirmed in writing from the museum and get a specific contact name to ring if you have any queries. If you ask for someone in person, you are far more likely to get a swift reply than if you ring up and ask for ‘the lady from the schools section' - she could be one of several.
Read all the paperwork the museum gives you - well in advance of the visit. It is no good just turning up having read it on the coach. This can make or break a good visit. For example, many visits are greatly enhanced by pupils dressing up in costume beforehand. This takes some advance organising! Often a museum will provide you with a copy of something to photocopy for your children. If you arrive without having done this, time is taken up at the museum getting it copied and you may be charged extra.
If there is a teachers pack or CD Rom or website, get hold of a copy. A good pack will enable you to prepare pupils well for the visit, enable you to help them follow it up and consolidate their learning and should provide you with plenty of background subject information and logistics information to make you feel confident about the visit too!
Explain any special needs that children may have when booking.
Let museum staff know of any special emphasis you would like on a visit - let them know how far into the topic you will be when you visit. A class visiting at the start of a topic is very different from that in the middle of a topic.
Ring and double check arrangements a week before the visit, just to check all is well.
Check the children: adult ratios comply with the museum's regulations and child protection policies (or if they have none, the DFES Health and Safety on Educational Visits guidelines). You may find that if adult : children ratios as agreed beforehand are not reached, that some activities cannot take place on the day for safety reasons. This is because museums legally cannot ignore their own risk assessments.
Do brief accompanying parents, carers and other teachers well beforehand. You may know what they site looks like and what is happening, but if they don't, chaos will reign. They need to know the where, when, what, how, why of their day as well as you. Make sure all adults have a copy of the day's timetable.
Plan your teacher-led sessions in detail (i.e. sessions where museum staff are not with your group). Museums may provide a suggested lesson plan and resource packs, but it is school staff who are well prepared who make all the difference.
Allow plenty of time for shop visits, lunch stops and toilet breaks. Museum facilities are sometimes limited, e.g. toilets, coat-pegs, storage etc. Many museums are in very old buildings or adapted buildings which were never meant originally to house large parties of children.
Check if you need to bring clipboards or any other equipment.
Please arrive in good time. Drive the journey from the school to the museum yourself if unsure how long it will take. Plan in contingency. If you are late it invariably means another part of your visit will be curtailed because time will have run out!
Don't overload the visit - or the children. A little less, done thoroughly is much better than doing lots superficially in a big rush.
Please fill in evaluation sheets. Museum staff don't hand them out for fun, but to find out what you really think. Be frank - if something didn't work well, say so. If you loved it, say so. Evaluation sheets are often used to support funding bids to continue good educational work.
Hopefully you will have a wonderful visit and come back again. If you do, start from scratch with organising and don't assume it will be exactly as it was last year - staff change, ideas change and workshops may not be the same as they were before.
If in doubt, ask!
