For the past ten years, ten museums and galleries in Pennine Lancashire have been part of the Department for Education and Art Council England-funded Museums and Schools programme (PLMS).
The programme improves cultural learning by encouraging primary and secondary school pupils to visit local museums and galleries and take part in educational learning sessions. It helps teachers too, offering professional development opportunities to promote creative learning.
PLMS commissioned us to dig into a decade’s worth of data on school visits to find trends and statistics that would inform future planning.
Our role
- Data analysis
- Report writing
- Presenting findings
Why PS Research?
The PLMS programme is well-established, delivering cultural engagement to thousands of children and young people in the area. Museum and gallery teams are great at what they do—including collecting data and turning it into quarterly and annual reports to meet objectives.
But when you’re sitting on 10 years' worth, there’s bound to be some gold you might have missed, forgotten or overlooked.
Based on our experience working on research projects for museums and varied data analysis expertise, PLMS felt we were the right researchers to find it.
Having a Lancashire postcode was helpful too. Familiarity with the museums and galleries, schools and locations gave us some early ideas of what to look for in the data (e.g. types of schools engaged and deprivation levels).
It also made it easy to meet up with the client in person. There’s nothing wrong with working over the phone or video call, we do it a lot. But in-person meetings always feel more engaging.
Being in the same room helped us create connections and provided more opportunities for important questions and conversations. It’s why, if possible, we try to chat with clients face-to-face during a project.
Those early meetings helped in two ways:
- They gave us a chance to understand what we were working with and what the client wanted to get out of the analysis.
- They helped us explain to the project lead—whose primary focus is arts and culture rather than analysis —how our process works and what they’d gain from it.
Getting the most out of what you have
The first job of any research project that involves working with existing data is to establish how much there is.
10 PLMS programme venues had collected 100 individual data files over 10 years, pulling headline statistics for national data returns. That left plenty to dig into beyond the surface.
The next job is to figure out how much of it is relevant.
Consistency and quality are common challenges of working with years of data across multiple venues. Small tweaks in how data is recorded can have a big impact over time. That was the case here.
Things like giving the same school different names and not always splitting out year groups for multiple class visits had caused inconsistencies.
To ensure reliable data for analysis over time, we worked to clean it—fixing or removing anything inaccurate, incomplete or irrelevant and bringing everything together in one master view.
This process also gave us a chance to create new variables to turn innocuous data points into potential insights, such as:
- Using a date field to generate 'month' and ‘year’ variables
- Combining fields, such as years into 'periods'
- Running postcode lookups to map the local authority district a school is in and the deprivation levels in that area
- Coding session names and descriptions into topics (used more for venue-specific analysis)
Now we had quality data to go at. But at this point, data is still lots of numbers in a spreadsheet.
Turning it into meaningful stories and insights takes the right tools and the expertise to use them effectively.
We ran the data (from nearly 6,000 visits) through our specialist analysis software, generating cross-tabulations to cut it in different ways, including by:
- Venue
- Time period (e.g., pre- and post-pandemic)
- New and repeat school visits
- Deprivation level
- Session topic
This helped us uncover interesting trends, such as which schools are most likely to engage with the programme, how schools in deprived areas interact with museums, where schools are located and peak periods for physical visits.
Making relevant data relatable
As much as we love spotting trends and finding stories in the depths of analysis software, data tables aren’t engaging for everyone.
To communicate our interesting findings to museum teams, we created a user-friendly research report, using infographic snapshots and concise copy to make information easy to understand.
We also turned the overall report into individual summary reports for each venue. While everyone involved is invested in the success of the PLMS programme, it helps to have specific data venues can use to shape their strategy.
Finally, we put on our best presentation clothes and headed to one of the programme venues to share our findings with venue leaders and managers.
Explaining the analysis and why it matters in person helped kickstart conversions that got stakeholders thinking about how best to use it going forward.
New perspectives can make a big difference
The PLMS programme is using insights from our data findings to shape how it engages with schools and strengthen links between schools and their local museums.
Having a clear view of the programme has also given them quality data to use for advocacy and funding bids to keep delivering meaningful experiences to children and teachers.
The project is a great example of the value of collecting data over a long period. While it’s often a requirement for cultural programmes to meet funding requirements, there are trends and insights buried in spreadsheets that can influence decisions about everything from what you offer to how you work.
Sometimes, you just need an expert’s eye and fresh perspectives to find them.