The gap in museum attendance and benefit between highly educated and economically advantaged people and economically disadvantaged people with less formal qualifications has not changed for at least 20 years. Decades of concerted efforts by museums of all genres and scales, supported by national and local government policy and targeted investment, including more than £5 billion of Lottery Funding, have not reduced this gap. While pockets of positive transformation have been achieved, museums have struggled to find ways to understand, consolidate, share and sustain progress towards more representative participation.

Research on/in museums focuses either on the micro (the impact on participants of small engagement projects), the macro (analysis of the demographics of participation based on large, usually official, datasets) and the normative (ethics/rights-based arguments for increasing inclusivity). There is no framework for bringing these together to increase museum inclusiveness which is both values- and evidence-based.

To change deeply entrenched and unequal patterns of visitation and benefit and make credible claims about their contribution to society, museums need to understand the extent to which the attendance and benefit gap is driven by societal factors, and which museum interventions are most likely to have an impact. Museums need to know how they can harness and grow their research capacity to move beyond ‘intuitive’ approaches to inequality and social change.

To achieve these aims, we will hold five workshops over 18 months from October 2023. These will bring social science scholars into dialogue with museum leaders committed to representative participation and research-led practice, cultural policy makers and museum scholars. The workshops are based on the hypothesis that a deeper understanding within museums and museology of (1) the nature and experience of inequality and (2) how large-scale social and behaviour change is approached in fields such as health, would open up the capacity to understand, theorise, design, implement, evaluate and sustain practices which may address the museum attendance and benefit gap. By engaging world-leading experts in Implementation Science, we will explore how insights from applied research can be used to drive lasting organisational change.

The main outputs will be a research agenda for museums and universities, a funding application to AHRC for follow-on research and a range of publications including a Draft Workbook on Understanding & Reducing Inequalities in Museum Attendance and Benefit for museum practitioners.

The new partnerships and synergies the Network will generate are urgent: increasing inequality, the long-term impact of post-2011 austerity, and the dramatic impacts of COVID and new technologies are changing patterns of visiting, often in ways that increase inequalities. As the cultural sector seems likely to face a new round of austerity, having a clearer, more realistic, understanding of how museums might make a greater and more transparent contribution to society would be invaluable.

Workshops

• Workshop 1: Understanding Inequality: Low Educational Attainment
• Workshop 2: Understanding Inequality: Poverty as a predictor of non-attendance
• Workshop 3:  Understanding Health Inequalities: What evidence to trust?
• Workshop 4 : Building Sustainable Change
• Workshop 5: Weaving the threads together