Every Child Matters to Museums

This outcome is about enabling learners to make good progress in their work and personal development and to enjoy their education (Guidance for Inspectors of Schools).

It includes:

• Ready for school
• Attend and enjoy school
• Achieve stretching national educational standards at school
• Achieve personal and social development and enjoy recreation

Enjoy and Achieve is an outcome that relates well to museums and how they bring learning alive. Strengths that museums can bring include:

• Opportunities for first-hand learning with primary sources
• Cross curricular links
• Contribution to the creative curriculum and creative thinking
• Access to different learning styles
• Visits to and visitors from another place

Museums can enable pupils to:

• discover meaningful connections with the past through artefacts that relate to their own experiences
• control the enquiry process: they speculate from their own observations and set hypotheses that are relevant to their own ideas
• reflect on their learning at each stage, identify their next steps and shape their own learning outcomes

There is a legitimate choice of learning pathways for individual pupils: not just in terms of topics to investigate but also in terms of the sites and artefacts and information that they need to look for and the learning goals they want to achieve.