Leeds Museums & Galleries Learning Policy

Learning is at the heart of Leeds Museums & Galleries (LM&G). We welcome, inspire and engage diverse audiences through our collections and enable them to build their own interpretations. Everyone in the service is actively involved in the learning experience.

Our Learning Policy sets out our values and direction, and is supported by a Learning Plan that links with the LM&G and wider Leeds City Council strategic plans and agendas.

Our values

Making connections between sites, collections, exhibitions and audiences, we believe in being:

• welcoming and accessible
• creative and purposeful
• curious and experimental
• enjoyable and sociable
• robust and meaningful
• listeners and leaders

These are distilled in our mantra: Curiosity, Creativity and Conversation.

Our vision

We meet people as individuals whether at our venues or in communities. They are welcomed and encouraged to explore their own meanings of an object, artwork or story. They gain a sense of belonging. They are inspired and supported to try art, science and culture, be curious, test, imagine and make, form opinions, debate, participate and challenge ideas in a safe environment. The experiences we co-produce are high quality, innovative, and acknowledge our diverse audiences.

Our mission

Our practice links people, place and object across the local, national and global platforms.

Our audiences

We are committed to lifelong learning. We are part of the fabric of the city, and responsive to its changes and challenges. We engage with under-fives and their carers, primary and secondary schools, teachers and trainee teachers, further and higher education, family groups, young people, communities, adults and other cultural professionals. We will create opportunities to engage new audiences.

Welcoming and accessible

We welcome visitors with additional needs and disabilities to our sites, and strive to make our spaces, programmes and digital engagements as accessible and inclusive as possible through diverse, interactive, multi-sensory experiences.

Curious and experimental

We provide a high quality, authentic learning experiences, where audiences and staff can feel safe and confident to try something new, or feel challenged.

Enjoyable and social

We provide social and fun experiences where audiences can engage in debate and find their own meaning within the collections.

Learning throughout LM&G

Learning is embedded throughout our Site, Collections, Community and Audience Development teams. We all participate in delivering public engagement and interpretation and reflective on our practice.

Listeners and leaders

We aim to be innovative and collaborative, and to engage all our colleagues across LM&G in co-producing learning and public engagement programmes.

Robust and meaningful

We are actively reflective on our processes, value differences in practices, experiment, take risks and foster areas of expertise across the Learning and Access team.

Our evaluation methodologies

We use the Arts Council England (ACE) Quality Principles and the Happy Museum Principles to plan and evaluate our programmes and projects. We use appropriate strategies for different audiences.

Creative and purposeful

We aim to devise as much as possible in collaboration with our audiences, and all new programmes involve formative consultation with audience groups.

Sustainability for the future

We hold the collections in trust for the future. We believe our programmes and projects should be honest, authentic and sustained. We aim to provide long term and regular engagement opportunities and spend money wisely on the programmes that people want and need.

Robust and meaningful

We aim to be ethical and sustainable in our practices toward people, funding and the environment.

Keeping people safe

Keeping people safe is everyone’s responsibility. We have a duty of care towards everyone, especially children and vulnerable adults, wishing to access our sites and collections. We adhere to the Leeds Safeguarding Boards and Leeds City Council Safeguarding, Equality and Diversity and Health and Safety Policies and Procedures. All staff and volunteers are trained or briefed on their responsibilities, and issues are raised quickly and dealt with professionally.