Thank you so much for having me. It is lovely to be here today.

It's an interesting question, because we recently changed the name of our department, from learning and programs to learning and engagement. Really, for us engagement is the way forward, the way to better describe what we do and what we offer to different audiences. As an engagement manager, my role is to think and to lead my team in engaging schools and families who come through our doors at the National Museum of Scotland and the National War Museum. And then to think more broadly about how we can engage audiences that maybe aren't currently coming through our door, how we can bring those people in who are maybe warm towards coming, and through our programs we can encourage them to take that step across the doorway and engage with what we do. That might be actually physically coming through our door, or it might be online as well. To me, engagement covers the full variety of things, from someone liking a tweet about dinosaurs, to coming in and taking part in a day long workshop where children get to learn amazing facts and figures and skills and experiences about dinosaurs. To me, engagement manager is really that huge variety of things. I manage a team of about 16 people who deliver, develop, evaluate, and it really makes those projects come to life.

Sure. We have four venues at the National Museums Scotland. Two of them are in Edinburgh. The two Edinburgh ones are where me and my team are based, and they are the National Museum of Scotland, which I hope some of your listeners have been through our doors and experienced the vast variety of topics we cover there, from Scottish history, to science and technology, to art design and fashion. There's also the National War Museum, which is within Edinburgh Castle. Then our other sites, one is the National Museum of Flight, which is out in East Lothian. There you can go aboard Concord, and really get to see what it's like, as well as get a vast variety of background on how the state operated as an airfield in the past. We also have the National Museum of Rural Life, which is in East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow, and there we have a 1950s working farm. On that museum site, that's the only place that you'll actually see live animals as part of our museum collections. We're just coming up to that time of year where you might see lambs or little chickens, little chicks when you go on your visit there. So across those four sites, we work together on developing things like our schools programs, and making sure that people have similar experiences. But each site is so distinct and has its own personality, that every program is different and actually tailored to the audiences. My team and I focus on the National Museum of Scotland and the National War Museum in Edinburgh, but we work really closely with the teams at the other sites as well. We also work and partner with museums across Scotland on programs as well. That for us is really nice as well, that we can reach out to audiences through other museums, where we maybe don't have a local base.

So each site has a really different audience demographic. As you mentioned, the National Museum of Rural Life is really popular with families because there's the farm and the animals, but there's also lovely interactive galleries in the museum. The National Museum of Flight attracts those families as well, it attracts quite specialist audiences who are really interested in aircrafts and their history. In the National Museum of Scotland, again, we attract lots of families, and because of our site in the middle of Edinburgh, the National Museum of Scotland and the National War Museum attract a lot of tourists. Edinburgh is a very popular destination for tourists. We expect to have a really wide variety of people through our doors. We also have a lot of students through our doors at the National Museum of Scotland, we've got quite a few universities and colleges just on our doorstep. We focus on engaging schools and family audiences, we know that at the National Museum of Scotland we attract a lot of families with children under five, so a really young audience. Since we've opened new interactive galleries in the past five years, we've really seen an increase in that number of age groups around that, kind of eight to 11 year olds coming in with their families. We've started thinking more about how we target those groups specifically. Then for schools, we know that schools come to the National Museum of Scotland and the National War Museum from about a 60 minute to 75 minute drive time. For those that can picture Scotland, that's as far away as the other side of Glasgow, it is up as far north as Dundee, and it's down into the borders and out East Lothian. So we attract schools really from all over on a daily basis, which is great for us. For those who can't come to us, we also offer digital outreach as well.

We have a fantastic community engagement team that my team works alongside, and they do a lot of really targeted work. They've done fantastic work in the last few years, really focusing on making our museums more accessible, and holding specific events and activities to really make the museum more accessible and bring in wider audiences. I think one project that we've just done recently that I would love to do more of is we just worked with two school classes, to have their input into a new display that's going to be opening at the National Museum of Scotland. That was really wonderful for us because it was classes who had never visited us, a school that had never visited us before, even though they were within Edinburgh. We knew that that area of Edinburgh, not only were pupils not coming to school, but their families weren't visiting the museum at weekends and holidays. That led to such a huge change, and what those young people thought about the museum, how welcome they felt at the museum, and I really love to do more of that. We worked with them over the course of about six months, and again to see that change from when they first interacted with us to now, they're so confident in coming to the museum and feel that the museum is theirs and know the staff. To me, really do more of that work and having that long term impact it's something I'd like to keep going with and do more of.

I think probably we work together across the museums on a number of different projects. One really successful thing we've done in the last few years is through our program, "Maths Week Scotland". Through the program "Maths Week Scotland", which we deliver on behalf of the Scottish Government, we have a focus every year on "show you're working" it's called, and it's in basically to show how a range of different jobs include maths in their daily challenges and tasks. We wanted to invite a huge variety of careers across Scotland to show that. I guess when you think about maths and careers, you think of people like engineers, or maybe math teachers, or accountants, and what we wanted to show was that math really is in every job you can think of. One thing we've done across our museums is encouraged people who work in all different roles to share how their jobs include maths within them. Last year, quite a few of our curators talked about how they use maths in their job. That might be from working out the dimensions of Roman silver and how it's been cut up, and then how it would look when it was in a full shape, to using math to conserve objects and to really understand the materials behind that the objects are made off. For us, that's been a really useful thing to think across our museums, about how else could we use our museum collections to really inspire people around math. We've put together a number of different resources as well and activities and events for families and schools to use. One of them is around Edinburgh Castle, it involves our museum, but it also involves the other sites in Edinburgh Castle, and it asks children with their schools or families to explore Edinburgh Castle and solve different math challenges as they go around. For me, I think we need to really think about it from the visitors point of view, and what do they want when they come through our doors. They don't see us as four different museums or different sites, they don't maybe understand the intricacies of funding projects or things that may have time periods that come to an end. I always think it's really important to just work together, to come up with things that will engage visitors in a variety of different ways.

That is a very good question. It came about because, if you ask anybody, anybody at all, and I'm sure if I asked you too, did you enjoy maths at school, a lot of people roll their eyes, oh, I hated maths at school. But then when you ask, maybe, what do you do in your spare time, and see, oh, I love to bake. Well, math is involved a lot in baking. Or what's your job? Well, I'm a sound engineer. Maths is a huge part of your role as a sound engineer. The Scottish Government did some research about what was really needed to really start to change people's opinion about math and get people excited about math. They came up with the idea of a special week to celebrate maths across the country. “Maths Week Scotland” has now been going for a number of years, and is now managed by us and my wonderful colleague, Katie Oldfield. Her role is to really think about just that question, why maths, and then think, how can we get different people excited about math. One event Katie put together last year was, if you're a fan of the Great British Bake Off, you might remember that last year we had a Scottish winner, Peter Sawkins. For “Maths Week Scotland” last year he did an online talk about how he uses maths in baking, which was fascinating. He also looks at some of our museum objects and how some of our museum objects could be used for baking, as well. To me, that's an example of how, one, you engage this huge variety of people who never would have thought about maths before, and two, you bring in a completely different aspect of learning because you bring maths to museum objects and baking, and then packaging it up in a way that's really appealing and interesting for a huge audience. I would invite you, the “Maths Week Scotland” this year is always in September, so I would invite you to look out for “Maths Week Scotland”. There are also maths weeks across the other nations in the UK. So look out for your local maths week, and you can find out what your enjoyment and excitement are in math, because there will definitely be something.

As well as self-led visits, we also offer a program of workshops and activities, like I'm sure a lot of other places do as well. Our workshops are on a huge variety of different topics. I think what's really nice for us is that because we followed the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, so it's a little bit different to the curriculum in England, which a lot of people will be familiar with, it's quite similar to the new developing curriculum in Wales. The Curriculum for Excellence, while there are certain topics that schools follow, so that might be Romans, or Vikings or dinosaurs, part of the Curriculum for Excellence is really about developing the whole child. So for every workshop, not only do we want them to take away a learning point about maybe Romans or Vikings, we want to look at their health and wellbeing or literacy or numeracy skills. For each of our workshops across our program, we can make a really cross curricular experience and really make sure that pupils are getting some personalization and choice as part of their day. That's another big part of the Scottish curriculum that's meant to be pupil led. So in all of our workshops we'll have maybe a set things that we'll do, we will give pupils an opportunity to explore our museums and to do activities which they have their own outcomes from, because I think for us, that's really important, that pupils all learn in different ways and are all interested in different things. We try and build that in as much as we can to a day visit to our museums. Pre-COVID we would have about, I think it's around 60,000 pupils visiting our four sites every year. And the majority of those are primary schools. But we also have a percentage of secondary schools that visit us as well. For secondary schools, we try and do more specialist activities. That might be working with fashion designers, or photographers or scientists. Our primary sessions are, like a lot of other museums, we deal with the big hitters, like ancient Egypt and dinosaurs.

We are still in quite low numbers in terms of students through our doors. As I said, Scotland's schools are a little bit more cautious in terms of visiting. We're at the point now of, I would say we're maybe welcoming three to four schools a week, whereas pre-COVID we could be sometimes like 20 schools a day. We are definitely still focusing more on our digital outreach at the moment.

I was really fortunate in that. I went to work at East Lothian Council Museums at a time when they were really leading the way in terms of digital and museums. I was involved in setting up the very first museum account on YouTube, the very first museum account on Twitter. And because it was so long ago, Bebo as well was one of the other ones. We were also the first museum service on Flickr. I worked alongside some amazing people who came from a digital background, and were really working at the cutting edge of digital technology as it was then. And through a grant by Museums Gallery Scotland they were working alongside us in museums. For me, my big passion is always about how we can engage people with museums and our museum collections, in as accessible a way as possible, and a way that doesn't have barriers. To meet, from the start, digital seemed like a way that we could reach people who couldn't travel to our museums, who faced barriers about coming through our doors, who might not think that museums were for them. But actually, if we put photographs of our objects on Flickr, then suddenly it opened up this huge market of someone who is interested in fishing nets will be able to find amazing photographs of fishing nets on our Flickr account, and be able to interact with them in a way that maybe on a visit to the museum, they wouldn't be able to, because they want to look it up close and add their own comments to it and really respond to. For me, from that, getting to know about how digital could be used, and then the fact that I was able to just try and test different things at East Lothian, I was given that space and time, I really thought, for me, this is the way forward. And of course, it just coincided with the idea that museums in general started to look at digital as a way to move forward into the future. I think still today, with the pandemic, again, I was really fortunate at the National Museums Scotland that when the pandemic hit, again, I was given a bit of space and time to really think about right, how can we capture and really use digital to make learning accessible across the country at a time when people needed it more. I think, in many ways, I really love digital and I see the benefit of it. I've been really fortunate that both of the organizations I've worked in recently have given me that time and space to think and to really act and to make things happen. I think that's often when things happen in museums, when people have that time to be agile and respond to things that are happening around them.

At the National Museum Scotland I worked with a wonderful team to develop a program called “Digital School Sessions”. These sessions are 20, 25 minutes, live, mini workshops that schools can tune in to. There are around 20 to 25 classes at a time, and we launched these in November 2020. And immediately, they were hugely popular. We've run them since November 2020, and what we found is that even within the first six months of running them, it allowed us to reach all 32 local authority areas in Scotland. Now that's something that we just couldn't do with people physically coming through our doors. We also found from our research and evaluation that it reached those areas, the areas of highest deprivation in Scotland. That was particularly areas in the centre of Glasgow, again, who might not have been able to afford transport to come through and visit us, and particularly areas in other cities like Dundee and Aberdeen. To me, that was one huge thing that not only does it help us with the geographic barriers of, well, a school from Shetland to come to us need to travel for a day, and then stay overnight, and come through the doors with us. Digitally it lets us reach them. So it removes that geographical barrier, but it also removes the financial barrier, in that schools don't have to fundraise to get on a bus and come. I think the other thing that came out from our research is that it got pupils really excited about museums, and the majority of schools who took part said they would be more likely to visit our museums in the future. So not only is it something that I think we can reach schools who can't get to us, but I think it also is about looking at building confident future visitors for museums. We all can think back and a lot of us who are in museums can think back to that moment that we had as a child, that made us think, oh, yeah, museums are the place that I feel welcome and that are for me. I think we might be able to do that in a digital way now, because children are so used to interacting with things like YouTube and watching unboxing and children playing on YouTube, my niece and nephew love that kind of thing. I think for me it would be amazing if we could inspire those moments for children to feel welcome in museums in the future through digital means as well.

I think that is thanks to our wonderful Marketing and Communications Department, in that really showing what a visit to the museum is going to be like. I think it's something we've thought about with our programming as well, that it's really important to have images of people wearing masks. The team actually had some feedback recently, it was a evaluation form from pupils that they filled in themselves, and it specifically said, we felt very safe in the museum with COVID. The team were delighted at that, because we have tried to, as you've seen, we have photographs of people wearing masks, and we've tried in other information that we're sending out to people before they come to our stations to just go over the COVID guidelines, but make them feel safe. One tip that we picked up from the Career Organization Science Keele is to have some kind of graphic on our workshop walls to tell pupils and to let them know what we're doing to make the space COVID safe. We had some feedback from children and young people that they feel much more confident if they have that. I think it's, again, in Scotland our restrictions have been slightly more strict than other places, so we are still at the point of facemasks, people have to wear them when they come in a visit to our museums. I think it's just really important that we show that, and we're delighted that you've picked up on that, because they have worked really hard on getting those images and updating them all.

Our Instagram account is led by our digital media team in the museum. And again, I think they will be delighted to hear that you have picked up on that, the idea about how they use Instagram to tell those objects stories. I think it's something that as a museum, we've been thinking a lot more closely about since the pandemic. There is suddenly that huge focus on digital. The digital media team have really thought about all the different social media channels we have, and what content should be included in them all to reach their audiences. We have our own NMS engaged Twitter account that is run by our fantastic learning enabler team. The interesting thing we found out about that is that it is set separately to the main National Museums Scotland Twitter account, and really, we are finding that our NMS engaged Twitter account is a fantastic way to reach directly to audiences, particularly to schools. We've found it's a really a lovely way of communicating with schools back and forward. Those digital sessions that we talked about, the Twitter account has just been invaluable in terms of hearing about what pupils do after they come on a workshop with us or take part in a digital session with us. We had a tweet from a school the other day that said, wow, thanks for sending us these dinosaur eggs through the post. We thought we haven't sent dinosaur eggs through the post, but it was just lovely that teachers have obviously got to that point where they're thinking about oh, they can speak to us on Twitter, and they can show us all the work they've been doing in their class. I think it's going back to your question about how do we bring things like object based learning to life across social media, and to me, it's about inspiring those conversations that hopefully it becomes a two way conversation, where we can see how people are responding to our objects and our collections, wherever they are in the world.

I was thinking back to this, I actually listened back to other podcasts and hearing people's wonderful stories, I thought, what is my story? I really remember, I think the thing that got me thinking about museums was when I was Wee, my mum and dad used to take us into Glasgow, and my mum would go to the shops. We lived in a Wee village, my mum would go to the shops, and my dad would take me and my sister somewhere else to run about that wasn't the shops. I remember him taking us to Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. My dad was a teacher, and he told us this story about how he took a class to Kelvingrove Museum, and half the class got to go to the Play Park and the other half got to go into the museum, and he took the half around museum. I assume the other half went with another adult, but it was quite a long time ago, so who knows. Then they swapped over, so that the other half of the class were gonna go into the museum and those who've been in the museum are gonna go to the Play Park. And when they went to swap, the half that had been in the museum said, no, we don't want to go to the park, we want to come back into the museum again. And I remember as a child thinking, that can't be right. Why would children choose to go to a museum rather than the park? But I was thinking that, knowing my dad and the way he is, he would have been having them reenact paintings and make animal noises as they're going around, and goodness knows what else. My mum and dad did that for us as well, took us to museums and really made them fun places to be. For me, that memory always stuck with me. It's a really clear memory I have that museum visits are often made by the people that you encounter on your visit. My dad's class had that experience in the museum, because he took them around, and he felt that it was pleasing for him and he could get them to tend to act with it. I guess that was kind of what made me think about, well, could I be that person for other people, because not everyone feels that museums are for them.

I actually didn't start out on a path to museums. I started out by going to university to study psychology and German. And within two weeks, I realised that I've chosen the wrong thing. I thought back to what I enjoy at school, and I enjoyed history. Fortunately, the university let me swap and pick up history, as well as psychology. At that point, I chose psychology and German because I thought that was going to guarantee me a good career. I guess that kind of stuck with me that you need to choose what you enjoy, rather than what you think might get you somewhere. I think one thing I struggled with the history degree is what job do you go into. I was really fortunate that I found a professor, Lynn Abrams at Glasgow University, who studies the history of children and women and oral history. I really got passionate about oral history and about interviewing people about their stories. But again, what kind of job can you have around oral history? I ended up with a lovely job in a community heritage organization, and then did some other oral history work with different charities, but I was a bit lost about where do I go next. I would keep going for interviews, I'm sure many people who listen to this podcast have been through this scenario before, where you keep going for interviews and you are told no, you don't have the experience, or you just missed out, or you didn't know how to answer the interview question. Again, I was just really lucky that I went for an interview at my local museum in Falkirk, and Peter Stuart, who was the head said to me, you didn't get the job, but come back, because I want to have a chat with you. And I thought, oh, no, I'm gonna get there, like, you said something really awful. Actually, he did the opposite, he said, look, you didn't get the job, but I think you have a future in museums, have you thought about a museum career? He kind of took the time to talk me through what that would look like. He said, look, I will be your supporter, and I'll be referenced to go into the Museum Studies course, and that took me in the right path. To me, I think I've been really fortunate in finding people who've given me the right advice at the right time. And then I suppose like everybody, is that thing about where do you start out then? For me, I actually started as a visitor services assistant at the National Museum of Scotland, where I work now. I think for me, the challenge was finding museums in the first place, because I hadn't thought about it as a career option, even though I've had that lovely experience.

I think some of the key challenges that museum educators face today is, first of all, competition around audiences. With that, there are so many options now for audiences. Audiences can choose to go to so many different places, not just museums. There are so many different visitor attractions and different sites people can visit, and digitally now as well, there's a lot of different options. To me, one challenge of museum educators is how do we keep offering programs and activities that people want to do and that really stand out against other places? But how do we keep that true to our mission and vision, in that we want to engage people with museum objects? To me, that's a big challenge. Another huge one at the moment is around funding. That is funding not just for us as museums, but our partners. A lot of our partners that we worked with pre COVID, we are finding now maybe haven't been able to reestablish themselves in the same way, or maybe are struggling, especially with current things happening, might be struggling to pay certain bills. We're certainly finding that some of our partners are struggling around that. I think the other thing is that our communities have been hugely impacted by COVID, and the ramifications will continue in the next five to 10 years. I guess, we've started thinking a lot more about health and well being of our staff, but also of people coming through our doors and how our programs could maybe build in things like mindfulness to them, because I think one thing that's on my mind is that visitors coming through our doors, who are worried about really basic things around shelter and food and heat aren't going to have that same quality learning experience. We need to think about how we can adapt our programming to really help people with those huge worldwide challenges we're facing just now.

Working with my team there are always weird and interesting moments. We have such a laugh in our office because there is always a dressing up outfit to hand, someone is always trying on. I walked in yesterday and Ally, our family engagement officer, was wearing an octopus head and tentacles. She was dressed up as an octopus, and I just walked into the office and went, oh, I see the dressing up costumes arrived. For us, it's just a daily part of our lovely busy office, are those moments that I don't imagine you get if you work somewhere else. One of the standout moments for me in terms of my career was when we had a visit from the astronaut Tim Peake. It was to be top secret that Tim Peake was coming to the museum, and we had his spacecraft on tour from the Science Museum. He was going to come to launch that being displayed in our museum. We wanted, as part of that, to bring in a school class to meet Tim Peake. but it had to be top secret. So I was given the lovely job of finding a school who had never visited us before, who could not normally come to us and who were studying space as their topic. But I was told that I have to get them to come, but it has to be a secret in the first instance of why they're coming. I phoned up the school and left a message. I explained who I was, oh, someone will come back to you. No one got back to me, and I phoned up again. I said it's really important, we're gonna give them a VIP school trip to the museum - oh, someone will come back. No one phoned me back, and I thought, I'm just gonna have to drop the name. I phoned up and just said, look, you're not allowed to tell anybody, but it's about your class would get to meet Tim Peake. And the office person said, ok, someone will phone you back. I went to a meeting, I came back and I had 20 missed calls from the school with five voicemails, and the teacher said, we want to meet him, we are coming, we are coming. The standout moment was going into the classroom, and it'd said to the class that I was coming in to talk to them about space, their topic, and it was going to bring some Meteorites. So I went into the class, and I was doing this session, and at the end, we did a quiz about astronauts, and the last answer was Tim Peake. And of course, they said we love Tim Peake, it is Tim Peake. I said, well, actually, I've come here to ask you today, if you would like to come to my museum next week, and you're going to get to meet Tim Peake. And there was just silence, the class just looked at me, their mouth actually dropped open, the teacher started crying, I think. It was just amazing. The next week the children came to the museum, VIP, were brought in before the museum opened, I ran straight to this corner, it is Tim Peake, and the class went oh, we are so excited. We went to walk around the corner, and Tim Peake just turned around and went morning, morning class. I think we'd all built up in our heads that he was going to be like seven foot tall, and wearing an astronaut suit. And actually, he was quite normal sized, and just the normal clothes. The class were super excited, and it was just such a lovely moment. They got a class picture with him at the end, and their faces are just hugely excited. For me, that always stands out as something. I mean, I would never have got that experience, to bring those pupils together with Tim Peake, and then to leave them with that lasting memory forever. That's a very special one for me.

Yeah, they were just bouncing off the walls is the only way to describe it. They were so excited. The other thing is, they've been told that it was top secret, that they weren't allowed to tell anybody and they were good to be on the TV as well, so they were beyond excited.

GEM is an organization that I have always found so useful since starting out in museum education and learning. They are an organization that is open for membership, so you can be a member through your institution if they are a member, or you can be a personal member or a student member or a volunteer member. GEM really provides resources and support and guidance and events and training, basically everything you need to work in museum education and learning. And at every point in your career, so from starting right through to senior management. The community call themselves “gemmers”, and that really shows that once you're a GEM member and once you go to GEM events and activities that there is this community there that is there to support you and give you advice on any aspect. I have asked GEM members to tell me where I would find the best pirate hats for a party, to asking them what I should include in an evaluation strategy. And they come through every time. They really are an amazing community. I think, for me being part of it as a trustee is getting to see that behind the scenes work that goes on in terms of GEM, and doing advocacy for museum heritage and museum learning, really, across the sector. There's the fantastic GEM conference every year where you can hear about the latest, and some really practical things about what is happening in museum learning. For me, the other thing about GEM is that it's available wherever you are. A lot of their courses and activities are online now, as well as they have regional meet ups. We have our GEM Scotland, there's a GEM Northeast, GEM London, so there's also the opportunity where you can connect with people across GEM, you can also get in touch with people really close to you on your doorstep, so that you can find where other people work in your area, wherever you are in the country.

Yes.

We've just been doing some evaluation with children and young people across Scotland with an artist collective called "Wave Particle", who are fantastic. They have been going around and talking to children and young people about what they think about museums, what they think should be in museums, and how we should experience museums. The feedback that we're getting just now is just the museum that I would like to create. One thing they've been doing is an activity called "Museum of You", where they each bring in an object and talk about why that should be in a museum. To me, if I had unlimited funding, that is exactly what I would do, a National Museum of You that was children and young people's objects and stories. Because the stories that they have are just fascinating and tell so much about modern Scotland, and the future of Scotland through their little snippets about what their hobbies are and who their families are, and what's important to them. I think the other thing I would love for this museum to do is to touch on some of the other things that children or young people would like to do, which is some of the other things, they would like to experience the museum by go cart, which I would also love to see in a museum, why not? And they would also love to have little mini replicas of museum objects that they could take home, ideally, 3D printed things. I would also have that in the gift shop. To me, that is the perfect museum. Wouldn't that be amazing, to see what basically the future looks like?

Thank you, Sarah. It's been fascinating.

People can find more about what we do on the National Museums Scotland website, which is https://www.nms.ac.uk/. You can also follow our department on Twitter, which is @nmsengage. So please do follow us on there and do ask us any questions as well.