Addressing the Attendance and Benefit Gap: a new Research and Implementation Paradigm for museums, galleries and heritage organisations

From prestigious national institutions to volunteer-run local organisations, museums, galleries and heritage institutions (MHIs) are a core part of the UK’s cultural infrastructure and amongst the most visible opportunities for people to engage with the Arts and Humanities in public settings. The cultural experiences they offer and the societal benefit they generate reflect the wider aims of public education in democratic societies, summarised by Crossick and Kaszynska (2016) as the cultivation of ‘reflective individuals' and 'engaged citizens’. Nationally and internationally, however, museum visiting reflects the socioeconomic gradient, and inequalities in who benefits from MHIs are rising. In England, whilst participation overall has increased since 2000, the participation gap between upper and lower socioeconomic groups has remained unchanged at c.24 percentage points and may be growing (Taking Part/Participation Survey). Decades of international research in cultural sociology, regardless of methodological or theoretical approach, show that people who participate in state-sponsored culture, including MHIs, are more highly educated and more economically advantaged. Population-level studies in the epidemiology of culture which show that simply visiting a museum may have positive health benefits, emphasise the lack of fairness in this distribution of cultural resources. Despite this evidence, MHI policy, investment (including over £5 billion Heritage Lottery funding) and redevelopment continue with little or no recognition of this wider context. There is no government policy or MHI strategy which addresses the fact, universally accepted in the sociological literature, that the most significant predictor of museum visiting is level of educational attainment; visiting increases at each educational level, with the most significant jump at degree level. In MHIs, often due to funder requirements, research capacity is used on evaluations of small projects to show their positive impact on participants from non-visiting groups. This approach cannot provide the level of strategic analysis and research rigour required to understand and address population-level disparities in attendance. As Hadley (2021) summarises, ‘the policy of the democratisation of culture, and the practice of audience development, appear to have failed’. Building on our AHRC Network (AH/Y002520/1), this research will provide MHIs with an urgently needed Research and Implementation paradigm equal to the complex challenge of closing the attendance and benefit gap. We will: Generate unprecedented levels of interdisciplinary and university-practitioner collaboration; Bridge DCMS, regional, and local data to develop a deeper understanding of educational disadvantage in relation to cultural participation; Develop rigorous philosophical analysis to clarify key underpinning concepts; Distil and rank existing 'what works' evidence as a starting point for action research; Integrate lessons from Implementation Science; Synthesise the above in a Democratising Museums and Heritage Research and Implementation Framework including actionable methodologies, ‘what works’ specifications, and implementation and evaluation strategies/tools that can: enable a sustained, contextual and evidence-led focus on closing the attendance and benefit gap; build understanding of causal connections between MHI innovations and changes in visitor demographics; generate a new museum research and implementation culture; nurture reflective individuals and engaged citizens; Test and refine this in the context of Birmingham Museums Trust; Identify processes, facilitators and barriers to change; Work with leading MHIs, policy and funding bodies to embed findings across the sector. Forging a new research and implementation paradigm, this project will, for the first time, enable MHIs to understand how they can close the attendance and benefit gap and deepen their contribution to society.