16 replies to this topic

[Stephen Drew]

I have revamped the Local Study Coursework visit for my Year 10s this year. In the past the school has done a 1/2 day visit to Fore Street in Old Harlow and to the site of the River Stort Canal.

I made it a whole day and added in a visit to Harlow Museum as well as taking the students on a guided tour of much more of the old town.

My reason for posting at the moment (we are going on Tuesday) is to ask how many people make use of their local town or county museums with their students.

The people at Harlow Museum have been amazingly helpful in setting up our visit. I went in today for the final check and chat and the Education Officer showed me a load more stuff she has dug out for our students to look at.

I am really looking forward to going and would recommend contacting local museums and seeing what they have to offer to anyone else.

[Richard Drew]

within a 30 minute drive are:

chepstow castle
chepstow museum
monmouth museum
nelson museum
caldicot castle
white castle
skenfrith castle
usk museum of rural life
newport museum
blaenavon ironworks
big pit
cosmeston medieval village
st fagans museum of welsh life
cardiff castle
national museum of wales
castell coch
caerphilly castle
tintern abbey
caerleon legionary museum and fortress
caerleon roman ampitheatre
caerloen roman baths
penhow castle
valley inheritance museum
tredegar house
welsh industrial and maritime museum
llancaiachfawr manor
abergavenny caslte
tretower court
tretower castle
raglan castle
llanyrafon farm museum
south wales borderers museum

how many do we currently take trips to?

none

typing this post has made me realise what a desperately poor situation this is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Nichola Boughey]

Within an hour drive:

Birkenhead Town Museum
Historic Shipyards
Lady Lever Art Gallery
Birkenhead Priory
Liverpool Natural History Museum
Liverpool Maritime Museum
Liverpool Customs and Excise Museum
Speke Hall
Ellesmere Port Boat Museum

Do we visit any of these? No.

Though I do plan to arrange a Saturday visit for my Yr. 11 group to the Liverpool Museum as it is running a huge Liverpool during the Blitz exhibition which will link in with their GCSE course.

We do travel to Styal Mill for a coursework trip in Yr. 10 and we take the whole of Yr. 7, in two days, to Conway for a Humanities trip.

[Carole Faithorn]

I am amazed at the number of places Richard has within reach of his school. What a lot of missed opportunities

Within easy striking distance we have all the museums in Bath and Bristol, but the only local resources we make use of are in connection with Y9 work on the Industrial Revolution when we go to Bristol and visit the Clifton Suspension Bridge and related museum and the SS Great Britain

We take Y10 to the Imperial War Museum and Y12 to the Holocaust Exhibition at IWM.

Y11 go to the 'Hitler on Trial' workshop (see the last few messages in this thread) and Y13 go to Revision Conferences if there are suitable topics at times when SMT will let them out of school.

ie not very much use made of local museums.

[Richard Drew]

I am amazed at the number of places Richard has within reach of his school. What a lot of missed opportunities 

i should mention 2 other things that give this a great sense of irony:

i) the 1 trip we do organise is for y10 to go to Ypres

ii) the Geography department take y7 to Big Pit (not sure if they think it used to mine colouring pencils or something)

[jo norton]

Being an island we are restricted to
2 Castles and 2 Museums (the Manx Museum and the Peel Viking/Celtic Museum) within 2 hrs 30 mins travelling time!

We take years 7 and 10 to the Manx Museum for a lesson each. Other than that our trips all have to be off-island.... its great when they announce sea sickness...

[Richard Drew]

I am really looking forward to going and would recommend contacting local museums and seeing what they have to offer to anyone else.

museums can help you out without you even needing to go there. i know that the NMGW (National Museums and Galleries of Wales) has a service where they will lend artefacts to schools for use in the classroom on a temporary basis. real hands on use of historical objects to stimulate interest and enquiry.

worth seeing of your local museum does the same, all museums must have boxes in the stores full of artefacts that they can't fit on display shelves and boards.

[alison denton]

Correct Richard - lamentable that we take no trips to any of these places any more.
During my time at the same school (21 years) we have visited virtually all the ones you mention, but no longer.
Partly the kiss of death to the trips has been the morass of bureaucracy needed to organise one, then the school policy that everyone must have an entitlement if it is to do with National Curriculum (ie - you take Y9 to Big Pit, and all 300 of them have to go - that is 6 coach loads spread over several days with all the cover that implies) and finally the lack of support if anything goes wrong: 'you're on your own mate'.

Having said that - a grand opportunity to 'take on some responsibility' my boy!

Best trip we ever ran was Y8 to hadrian's Wall - 5 days, a day there and another back, coach with no loo of course, and infrequent motorway stops (result on one trip - a plastic bag of wee presented to us like a goldfish at a fair!), staying at boarding house in Whitley Bay right opposite a permanent fair. Took kids to Lindisfarne, Durham, Beamish, Housesteads and Vindolanda, Carvoran, and bowling, skating, swimming in the evenings. I have great memories of those trips - from the days when trips were trips, things happened that we had no contingency plan for and we all somehow got back safely. My daughter's IT teacher (and my daughter is Y10 in Sept) is a pupil I took on one of these when he was 13, and he can still remember the details eg. of me falling down just 1 stair in the boarding house and breaking my ankle (and that was before the bar opened!)

[JuliaM]

I'd certainly agree that it's the logistics and cost that seem prohibitive, but it also depends on the school. I teach in an area surrounded by historical sites, and yet it was only after constant nagging (by me) that the HoD agreed to take the Year 7s to a local castle, despite it being an annual trip. In fact, he agreed to it so late in the term that we didn't have any time to do any follow-up work afterwards (though spending a sunny afternoon at a castle is great in itself... especially when I don't have any projects to mark afterwards!).

However, in my last school, as long as we did the proper risk assessments etc it was relatively easy to organise excursions. Within a year of being there, I'd taken trips to Warwick Castle for the Year 7s, a fossil hunting residential for Year 5 & 6s, a visit to a Roman villa for Year 8s, and the Year 6s went to see the mummies in the Ashmolean. In addition, I assisted on a residential to the Isle of Wight which included a dinosaur element!

Now I realise what a mountain-out-of-a-molehill situation some schools make of excursions. I'd love for each of our year groups to have a history trip. Especially as, in my last school (in Cowley, about three miles from the centre of Oxford) I'd discovered that some of the children had only ever been into the centre of Oxford a couple of times, and then it was to go shopping - they had no idea about museums or just staring up at gargoyles! I'm sure that every school has a section of kids who have never had the opportunity to go traipsing over historical sites, or even been to a museum.

In light of what I'm rambling on about here, and to get to the main point of the post, museum trips don't often seem to be a priority. Perhaps museum staff could rethink their approach and offer a schools visiting service - bringing appropriate artefacts/ costumes into schools, rather than cramming the milling kids into the often confined spaces of a local museum? I know that some museums have put details of their collections online, but it's far better to be able to handle the objects - or at least gaze at them in 3D!

[Carole Faithorn]

I have great memories of those trips - from the days when trips were trips, things happened that we had no contingency plan for and we all somehow got back safely.

Ah! Those were the days, Alison! Your tale brings back similar memories

[mattzb]

to my shame have never been to the Museum of London - have people found it to be worth the visit? We're considering taking Yr 8 somewhere different next year (currently visit Ightam Mote, Hever Castle and sometimes Penshurst) and thinking about ideas...

[Shamrock]

Two hours and thirty minutes!! Are you travelling by horse tram?

No college mini bus

Thats an easy journey for us, as Grimsby is at the end of the line, very rural, narrow twisting roads. However, we have an excellent National Fishing Museum, 10 mins away, good helpful libraries.

Lincoln 1 hour, Castle, Roman Colonia plus medieval town,

Hull 30 mins into a foreign country has an excellent Museum Quarter, thoughly recommended

Flag Fen Bronze Age village and musuem, near Peterbro: 2 hours
Excellent Country Houses, some of the best Normanby Hall,30 mins
Belton House 2 hrs.
Were lucky
Nottingham is around 2 hours again excellent choice of County house, museums and the castle.
Cresswell Crags 2 hours,

My victims love their field trips, even in the rain with no comfort stops and bags of wee it well worth it.

Edited by Carole Faithorn, 23 July 2003 - 12:14 AM.

[Stephen Drew]

My school operates a totally positive attitude towards school trips which means if there is any possibility of it being found a space in the calendar and cover is at all possible it can happen.

As far the "Your on your own mate" policy of some schools, nothing could be further from the truth. I had major problems at the end of my trip for Year 10s to the old town this week. I shall not go into too much details, but suffice to say five rude girls and three vandal boys were involved.

The support I have recieved from the Deputy Head and Head yesterday and today has been second to none and has managed to help me overcome a feeling of complete depression and anger about what happened and how those children treated me and the trip.

It makes all the difference to have the support, and as a result I will be organising more new things next year.

Note to self: pull your finger out and get in touch with the National Portrait Gallery about Year 8 trip.

[Dan Moorhouse]

Local sites for me include:

National Film / Photography Museum
Bradford Industrial Museum
The Peace museum
Bronte Parsonage
Bradford Cathedral
West Yorkshire Archives
Kirkstall Abbey
Thackray medical museum
Royal Armouries (Leeds)
Cliffe Castle Museum
Wakefield Castle
Skipton Castle
Bolling Hall
The Childrens Museum

We go to:

Thackray Medical Museum and Skipton Castle for KS4 plus the Hitler on Trial and 'The Doctors Show' performances.

Have done Skipton Castle at KS3 and will be doing so again next year.

Archives - Gifted and Talented.

Royal Armouries - selected students based on effort.

Film/ Photography museum - as and when the exhibitions suit our needs though most students go there regularly anyway - it's spitting distance.

Industrial Museum - far too close to my grandmothers house, can't be scaring her too much!

I've been given the OK for loads of visits next year. year 12 have 3 booked, year 11 have 4 booked, Year 10 have 4 or 5 depending on how a clash of dates is resolved. I expect KS3 students to have at least 3 visits per year from Sept onwards as well. We have also now got ery good links with a Lving History group, via out KS5 partners, and will be doing 3 or 4 weekends of reenactment next year - mainly KS3 but scope to build into KS4-5 provision.