The early Years of the Museum Schools Service at National Museum Cardiff

Preparing items for the Museums School Service in 1950

The Museums School Service in the 1970's

The Museums School Service (Learning Department) today

The Education Service of Amgueddfa Cymru — National Museum Wales celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in 2009. It was founded in 1949 as The Museum Schools Service, but is now the Learning Department.

The driving force behind the schools service was the then Director, Sir Cyril Fox, and the new service aimed to improve teaching and learning in conventional subjects whilst also creating aspirations beyond the curriculum. The creative input was to be provided by subject officers - qualified teachers already based in the appropriate curatorial departments.

The Museum Schools Service could not be fully integrated into the Museum as it was independently funded through subscription by various local education authorities (LEA's). However, with the withdrawal of LEA funding in the 1990s and the creation of unitary authorities, the Learning Department became fully integrated into the National Museum.

The prime aim of the curators is to collect, preserve, interpret and display material, and make available for researchers those items that are held in the reserve collections. Such accessioned items do not lend themselves to handling sessions by school parties, nor as loan material to schools. Nevertheless, the Schools Service was able, over the years, to build up a considerable loan and handling collection, one which is still maintained.

Subject catalogues were compiled to enable schools to select material for loan, and the loans were then allocated at the end of each term ready to be delivered around Wales at the beginning of the next term.

By 1970, all the curatorial departments were in some way participating in the Schools Service, including the Welsh Folk Museum, as it was then, at St Fagans National History Museum. All the LEAs in Wales were contributing to the scheme, and as a result all secondary schools could receive major loans every term, whilst primary schools had travelling displays, and of course many schools made visits to the museums in Cardiff and St Fagans, as they do now to all the sites.

Such was the reputation of the Museum School Service that staff were invited to assist in the setting up of similar ventures in other countries.

Article by Donald Moore (former School Service Officer in Archaeology at the Museum, later Senior Officer administering the whole service)