Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-40)
MS HEATHER
MAYFIELD AND
MR RICHARD
WOFF
13 JUNE 2006
Q20 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: What
are the figures, then, between those who just go simply to go
in there and others?
Ms Mayfield: Most of our visitors
do not go on the tour or a pre-booked visit.
Q21 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: Sorry,
I did not mean a pre-booked visit in the sense of necessarily
going right the way round the whole of the building but going
to look at something. A trail rather than a tour.
Ms Mayfield: That is true. Most
visitors who come come because they want to see a specific thing
or go to a specific gallery rather than being booked to come to
an event or programme we are running.
Q22 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: Following
that up, then, if we could not give a trail because the House
was in session, is it not possible that a lot of children would
be very disappointed if they came and they were limited solely
to going in the visitor centre?
Ms Mayfield: I think they would
unless you could provide something in the visitor centre that
they were not able to get anywhere else.
Q23 Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe: Would
that not apply to adults as well?
Ms Mayfield: I think it would,
yes.
Q24 Lord Craig of Radley: Following
the line of my own thinking on this, you have identified, for
example, for children the windows of opportunity. This building,
of course, is a very different place when it is in session from
when it is not, and therefore any visitor, depending on when they
come, will either see a lot with a lot of people around or may
see very little, or places will be shut off because the workmen
are busy using the recess period for refurbishment. Do you have
any advice about how one should handle that sort of problem?
Mr Woff: You mentioned earlier
on this notion of coming somewhere, either to see something which
you cannot see anywhere else because it is unique, such as the
building or the office and the museum, or to get an experience
which it is perhaps more difficult to replicate in the classroom,
and I am thinking particularly of school students, so there could
be things which happen here which are very fulfilling and very
worthwhile for the children which the teachers would find it very
difficult to replicate in their own classroom, and that might
be things like personal contact either with members or with actors
or interpreters of some sort, or engaging in sorts of activities
which are not the sorts of activities that go on normally in the
classroom, so you could look at a whole range of programmes which
certainly could be very satisfying and very fulfilling and worthwhile
for the children coming, even though they did not actually see
the interior of the building or the changes as such.
Q25 Baroness Prosser: Going back
to the interactivity point, we obviously have yet to decide exactly
who we are aiming this at and there is lots of discussion to take
place before we reach those conclusions, but would you say that
interactivity is less important (a) for older children and (b)
for adults? The Science Museum in particular attracts quite young
children where, unless they are doing, then they are being a pest
really, but with older young people and adults is interactivity
quite so important for them?
Ms Mayfield: The most common request
we get at the Science Museum is to provide an interactive gallery
for adults only, so I think it is a myth that interactivity is
not important. It really is genuinely that what you do is absolutely
only do-able here, be it interactive, be it through anything you
do, and the kind of interactivity we talk about now is absolutely
not about sitting and responding to a screen; it is about so much
more than that and it gives you many more opportunities. Obviously
the way people are interactive on the screen now is at home and
on the web, so it is important that whatever happens in the Parliamentary
visitor centre it is able to get UK-wide through that extension.
But ultimately what you will create is an exhibition space of
some type even if it is a visitor centre, and the thing to remember
is that culturally they are very different spaces so if you go
to an exhibition in Germany or America you will see a lot of text
which you do not necessarily see in the UK, so it is also about
being very sure about what is right for this building and for
people who will come here, and then delivering it to the highest
quality you can.
Mr Woff: The nature of the interactivity
depends to a large extent, too, on what the context is of the
work that students are doing. It is probably horribly untrue and
Heather will tell me it is not true, but one can see that if you
are trying to get young people to explore science and scientific
processes then the type of interactivity they engage in is just
right for the kind of thing that is on in the Science Museum.
If students are coming here, predominantly secondary students,
perhaps, doing citizenship which is a different set of processes
from scientific process and scientific investigation, then the
nature of the interactivity will therefore be different and it
may well be that there are not the type of mechanical interactives
that can deliver the sort of thinking for something like citizenship
or exploring democracy or whatever it is that there are for scientific
principles.
Q26 Chairman: Could you give me some
tips, because far fewer children are going to come to our visitor
centre than go to either of your institutions on how we should
organise the information that we have in our visitor centre, which
will be visual, to go out to the rest of the schools? Would this
be on line? Or in video conferences? If I am running a school
in Durham, can I access the British Museum and get wonderful things
from you or not?
Mr Woff: I think what is very
important is that there is the national remit of the national
institution really physically based in London and that is one
of the issues. A school in Durham can get on-line material from
us so there are excellent websites with very good photographic
and interpretative and interactive material.
Q27 Chairman: Related to the curriculum
at all?
Mr Woff: Yes. We also have a programme
of travelling exhibitions and so there are actual exhibitions
which take objects physically from here to somewhere else, and
they usually are very embedded within the educational context
of the region they are going to, so they have educational programmes
and interpretative programmes around them as well. Video-conferencing
is another way certainly of doing it. Again, there is a wide suite
of video-conferencing. We thought of having video-conferencing
with curators. Video-conferencing is as time-consuming as having
a curator physically in front of a group of people because it
is in real time, and so you have to look at what the economics
of video-conferencing are, and there is a big difference between
having a member with thirty children in the class in Durham and
a member with 500 children in classes dotted all around the country
for video-conferencing. Those are very different experiences for
the children and you have to look at what the balance and resource
and time is against what the outcome will be for the children.
Q28 Lord Methuen: Do you think we
would benefit by having a mock-up of the Commons chamber in which
the children could role-play the various activities that go on
there?
Mr Woff: I mentioned this, and
I think having a space where the activities of the chamber could
be replicated would be very good. I hesitate in saying that you
should go to committing that space to being entirely for that
purpose because that locks you into a large amount of building
and decoration, and it means that that space can really only ever
be used for that, so I would be inclined to say that you could
have a flexible space with quite easy, simple props which could
be brought in when you wanted to have it play that function, but
when you did not you could take them out and use that space for
something else.
Q29 Lord Methuen: I come from Derbyshire
and in Derby there are new Assembly Rooms that can be used either
for a performance, a big dance or whatever, and then hydraulically
you can remove the whole of the seats to give you the clear space
which you need on a different occasion.
Mr Woff: Yes.
Q30 Lord Jones of Cheltenham: Can
I ask you more about your online services and how you reach out
to the rest of the world? What proportion of your staff are involved
in that and what is the cost, if you know, of the on-line services
compared with your total costs?
Ms Mayfield: For every new exhibition
that we do the on-line presence has to exactly replicate the experience
of the gallery, so if the gallery has games or activities they
also appear on-line and everything that we develop that appears
on the floor of the Science Museum appears in the same form on
the web, so as much as you can you are getting exactly the same
quality of experience. Everything we do for teachers and schools
is downloadable from the web only; we do not produce any paper
resources at all any more. At the Science Museum we have three
members of staff who run, manage and develop the website but we
send everything outside that we have developed and designed. I
would have to come back to you on the classes because I do not
have that at my fingertips, but we have more real visitors on
line now than we do coming through the doors.
Q31 Chairman: Could you give us an
idea about foreign visitors? We think half of our visitors are
going to be foreign. Can you give us some tips on how to cope
with that, because in the British Museum for the Japanese, all
the labels are in English, not in Japanese.
Mr Woff: They are. There are guides
in different languages. I cannot remember the exact figures but
I think certainly 60% of our visitors and maybe higher are from
overseas, although not necessarily non English speaking. There
is a high proportion of Americans as well. But yes, we have audio
tours which are in different languages, for example, and technology
is moving towards it being much easier to provide palmtop or other
forms of guidance for visitors that are in other languages too,
so there are ways of doing that. The extent to which you rely
on actual physical labels is a problematic issue in terms of space.
One of the reasons why labels in art galleries are only in English
is because it would not make any sense to try and label everything
in numerous languages because then there would not be any room
for the objects in the cases themselves, so there is a limit to
what you can do. So we see providing for non English speaking
visitors through tours, audio guides, guide books, and, increasingly,
through the use of digital guides, I suppose, as well.
Ms Mayfield: I think the reality
is, looking at how the technology is going, that by the time you
open people will be able to download in their own language to
their own mobile phone, so you need to look at forward briefing
so you can pod cast the guide and people can pick it up before
they come, and there is a whole series of technology now where
you stand in front of the exhibit and download information about
it and that sort of thing. So in three or four years' time we
need to look at this sort of thing.
Q32 Chairman: If you both were asked
to set up a visitor centre catering for one million people a year,
what sort of staffing would you have in mind? It will not be held
against you, just give us some sort of indication.
Mr Woff: You obviously have to
have security staff so I am thinking more about the categories
of staffing. You would have to have security staff. You would
have to have a substantial visitor operation staff that interfaces
with the public, those members of the public who are doing perhaps
no more than coming into the visitor centre to book themselves
onto a tour around the House, that potential minimal experience
of it. Then right the way through to looking at education staff,
people who were developing and delivering the face-to-face activities
with the people who are coming in, and also developing back-of-house,
I suppose, the exhibitions you would happy to look at and interpretation
stuff. It is very, very difficult to put a figure on that in terms
of numbers.
Ms Mayfield: At the Science Museum
we do take one million children a year, and taking out security
and front-of-house staff who sell tickets and things, we have
37 full-time explainers, staff that work on the floor specifically
in the children-only galleries, and we have a learning department
of just over 14 who service the schools audiences both inside
and outside. It is a fairly big undertaking.
Q33 Baroness Prosser: On top of that,
Lord Chairman, there are the people that do the cleaning, catering,
and looking after the coats, and the general maintenance and repair.
Ms Mayfield: We have very complicated
buildings and that adds to staffing and adds to the problem. If
you are staffing from scratch you can make yourselves a much easier
building than we have.
Q34 Chairman: And do you envisage
actors describing the various things, dressed up in various clothes?
Mr Woff: Yes we do and we have
a whole range of people from Roman legionaries up to Hans Sloane
and others who are in our galleries at various stages of activity.
Yes, and it is actually a fantastically popular approach to the
building.
Q35 Chairman: We would have to have
Disraeli and Gladstone.
Mr Woff: I think that is bang
on and I think Cromwell might also be popular.
Chairman: Is there any other advice you
would like to give us before we embark upon this great project?
Baroness Prosser: Do not do it!
Q36 David Lepper: Could I ask one
final thing arising from what has just been asked about actors.
The explainers and educators, the actors that you talked about,
we will use those terms; how many of those people are full-time
members of your staff? Are they on short-term contracts for particular
exhibits or is there a core of staff who are with you all the
time in those various categories?
Ms Mayfield: We buy the acting
in from a group. They are there every day but we do not employ
those actors beyond their main contracted members of staff and
we have the equivalent of 37 full-time explainers. That equates
to 72 staff, so we have more people on at the weekend, we have
more people on in the holidays and we have a lot of staff who
only work when the schools are there.
Mr Woff: We tend to buy in people
like actors and interpreters and freelancers on an occasional
basis. Our core staff is much smaller. The schools team in the
British Museum is probably full-time equivalent, including me,
of about 3.5 people and we have a budget which allows us to buy
in a certain amount of freelance teaching on that basis as well.
The other thing is we are dependent on budgets which are available
for exhibitions or particular seasons which we buy in, so we operate
on a much smaller unit than at the Science Museum.
Q37 Lord Brougham and Vaux: Where
do you think the best place would be for this visitor centre?
Ms Mayfield: I really was not
able to answer that question because it is so important. It is
about how people will arrive, where the coaches will park, how
they will get in and out, how easy it is going to be, so I found
it impossible to comment on that. I just do not know how people
will arrive on the site.
Mr Woff: The same.
Q38 Lord Methuen: Do you think it
should have covered access to this main building?
Mr Woff: I think it probably has
to. I am just looking mainly at schools. If those school children
are going to take off their coats and put them into their lockers
in the visitor centre, you do not want them then to have to come
across the road or whatever in the weather unless again you look
at the logistics of what the visit is. You could look at it as
going to the visitor centre, having the experience of the visitor
centre and then leaving the visitor centre via the site itself,
so they do not come back to the visitor centre, but then you have
to accept that the children would be carrying everything with
them once they had left the visitor centre.
Chairman: It is very oriented to children
in coaches. The coaches that seem to come to this place are usually
quite elderly people and they stop at the end of Black Rod's Garden
and wander down into it. We do not often get many children.
Lord Brougham and Vaux: Whatever age
they still leave by the same place they arrive. They have to go
back.
Q39 Chairman: Exactly, this is a
whole new concept. If we are going to get a lot of children we
are going to have to think very hard about figures. What I learned
at the Science Museum was that coach parties were very important.
Ms Mayfield: Yes.
Q40 Lord Jones of Cheltenham: Is
there anything from your experience which you have done which
are mistakes that we can avoid?
Ms Mayfield: We have a very large
schools audience and we have a very inadequate entrance for them.
We do have a large schools audience and when we redeveloped our
schools entrance we did not make it big enough, so my only lesson
from that is whoever the audience is it must be appropriate for
that audience.
Mr Woff: I couple that with also
making sure that you have enough staff to run what you want to
run effectively and efficiently without stretching the staff to
the utmost. I think education staff are very important and you
need to staff this facility appropriately with education and with
visitor services and the staff need to be the right staff for
the task you want as well. They need to be trained to work effectively
with the visitors.
Chairman: Does anybody want to ask any
more questions of these two witnesses? Thank you both very much.
We very much appreciate sharing in your experience.
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