APPENDIX 19
Supplementary memorandum submitted by
the Natural History Museum
1. In response to a request from the Clerk
of the Committee on November 21, we have provided information
on our education programmes, our socio-economic visitor distribution,
as much as we know about "Touchstone" and details of
the Midge Thermometer from Steve Brooks.
ADDRESSING THE
EDUCATION ISSUE
AT NHM
2. We are currently undertaking a review
to look at why our school visits are falling. Some preliminary
findings are given below. It is now certain that there are a number
of issues that are negatively affecting school visits:
a. The QCA guidelines (Qualification &
Curriculum Authority) are very prescriptive, teachers are tending
to stick to the exact wording, which is given for each term in
the words "this term you should xxx" if it doesn't say
visit a Museum then people don't.
b. Numeracy and Literacy Hours are cutting
into the time available for trips out and are imposing a structure
that prohibits taking the children out.
c. Science is one of the three core subjects
in the National Curriculum—it seems that primary school
teachers in particular are applying this quite literally, because
Natural History is not on the curriculum, they go to science centres
etc, but not to the Natural History Museum.
d. Travel to London is difficult and becoming
more so, especially in the light of terrorist threats.
e. Finally, an internal issue is the upper
limit we place on numbers of school children—1,500 per day.
This is a Health & Safety issue and is limited by the number
of picnic spaces available. The Science Museum does not have this
self-imposed limit. We are going to reconsider this ceiling as
on some busy days in peak school visiting time we have to turn
schools away.
3. The general issues are therefore surrounding
the increased levels of regulation on the school day. We are in
the early stages of addressing these issues, and intend to tailor
our offering to be more aligned to what the teachers need to meet
the curriculum requirements.
C2DE VISITORS
4. C2DE UK visitors are a target in our
funding agreement with DCMS. Due to the 70 per cent increase in
visitor numbers, although the relative proportion of visitors
from within this category has fallen, in absolute terms it has
risen as shown in the table below. As a comparison, the relative
and absolute visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum are also
provided (these were the only outturn data available).
| | The Natural History Museum
C2DE visitor information
| The V&A
C2DE visitor information
|
| | Outturn
Percentage
| Number of
visitors |
Outturn
Percentage | Number of
visitors
|
| 2000 | 22 |
284,000 | 13
| 64,100 |
| 2001 | 24 |
298,000 | 9
| 52,300 |
| 2002 | 16 |
321,000 | 10
| 116,600 |
5. As a comparison, the DCMS website provides details
of the various Funding Agreements for the period to the end of
March 2002 between the Department and the national museums and
galleries. The C2DE targets for a selection of national museums
and galleries are as follows:
| Institution | 2000-01
| 2001-02 |
The British Museum
Target for UK visitors
| 1,480,000 | 1,800,000
|
| Target proportion for C2DE visitors | 13%
| 14% |
| ie Absolute target for C2DE visitors | 192,400
| 252,000 |
Tate
Target for total visitors
| 5,000,000 | 5,000,000
|
| Target proportion for C2DE visitors | 11%
| 11% |
| ie Absolute target for C2DE visitors | 550,000
| 550,000 |
The National Gallery
Target for C2DE visitors (as given in the Funding Agreement)
| 450,000 | 460,000
|
6. No detail of performance against these indicators
was readily available from the institutions' websites.
THE TOUCHSTONE
PROJECT
7. Directors of DCMS-sponsored bodies attended a seminar
in the spring of 2002 at which Touchstone was launched. We are
aware of the four priorities (colloquially referred to as kids,
community, economy and modernising delivery) and that these will
take over from the DCMS objectives which have been the framework
for our funding agreements to date. It is anticipated therefore
that in the forthcoming funding agreement discussions our performance
indicators and targets will be focused on these four areas.
8. We are not certain the extent to which the "modernising
delivery" element of Touchstone will comply with our own
wishes to modernise the relationship between DCMS and ourselves.
9. The scale and impact that the Touchstone Project will
have on us is not yet clear. However, this area relates to the
point Neil Chalmers made in his submission to the Committee that
we are reticent to commit to undertake activities that are related
to the wishes of the Government of the day by using our core funding,
since it is our view that the core funding should enable us to
undertake our statutory obligations. We would (when the activities
are appropriately related to our work) be happy to undertake such
work as separate contracts with clearly defined targets and milestones,
and a clearly defined separate budget.
Mary Fridlington, Directorate
THE MIDGE
THERMOMETER
10. The collection of non-biting midges (Chironomidae)
at the Natural History Museum has been built up over the last
150 years and is one of the most comprehensive such collections
in the world. The original focus of the collection was on the
adult stages because it is on the adults that the taxonomy of
the group is based. However, previous curators of the collection
also ensured that the immature larval and pupal stages were also
collected and incorporated into the collection. In particular,
the collection includes many microscope slides on which reared
material has been mounted. These slides include the easily identifiable
cast skins of larvae and pupae as well as the adult insects into
which they developed. So the immature stages are associated with
positively identified adults. It is only by having this associated
material that the immature stages can be identified.
11. When this material was originally assembled there
was little interest in the larval stages of midges. However, in
the last decade it has become apparent that midge larvae are powerful
indicators of climate change. They are abundant and well-preserved
in lake sediments and most species have rather narrow climatic
tolerances. By taking thin slices of a lake sediment core we can
look at changes in the species of midge in that lake at 10-year
resolution over the last 15,000 years—back to the end of
the last ice age—when lakes in northern Europe first formed.
We use the collection of midge larvae in the NHM collection to
help us identify the midges preserved in the sediments.
12. By looking at the modern distribution of midges in
Europe we can work out the optimum temperature for each species.
Using this information we can then work out what the temperature
was likely to have been to give us the species assemblage of fossil
midges in a particular sediment slice. We can test the performance
of this midge thermometer by using it to estimate the present-day
temperature of a lake from its modern midge population. We have
found that our midge thermometer is accurate to about 1ºC,
but we expect to be able to reduce this error to about 0.5ºC
with a little more work.
13. Analysis of oxygen isotopes in ice cores from Greenland
provide a high resolution record of relative temperature changes
over thousands of years. The trends shown in the ice core records
are closely reflected by the trends we have found in midge-inferred
temperatures from lakes in northern Europe. The added bonus of
the midge record is that it provides a quantitative estimate of
temperature changes, and it is considerably cheaper to obtain.
14. By using midges to quantify past climate change we
can see the natural background variability of climate change since
the end of the last age and compare this against climate change
during the last 70 years. The instrumental record goes back at
most only 250 years and this is not long enough to provide a complete
picture of natural climate variability. Investigating how climate
has changed in the past helps us to understand climate feedback
and forcing mechanisms and to better predict how climate systems
are likely to respond to rapid warming. We can also use midge-inferred
temperatures to validate the climate models that are used to predict
future climate change by testing their ability to estimate climate
change in the past.
Steve Brooks, Entomology
25 November 2002
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