BIRMINGHAM MUSEUMS
Using ILFA to develop exhibitions and learning programmes
Birmingham Museums deliver learning opportunities using the city's collections as well as contemporary
exhibitions and exhibits on art, history and science. They have a vibrant learning programme for schools,
families, adults, young people and groups and are stewards of some of the city's finest heritage buildings.
What made you choose the Inspiring Learning for All framework to work with?
As a museum, we have used ILFA for many years and have found ways to really make it work for us in the
development of activities and exhibitions, that then feed into an evaluation strategy to determine relative
success or failure of meeting those learning outcomes.
What aspect of your organisation’s work or project did you choose it for?
Exhibitions and learning programmes.
When and how did you use the framework?
In the development phases of learning programmes for example, we have a clear process of identifying
desired learning outcomes (using a GLO format) as well as identifying how we might achieve these for
different audiences (visitors, partners, BMT). See our example template and a completed example.
From this we can then identify how we would measure whether or not this learning has taken place (e.g
observation, questionnaire, focus group) and then use that to build an evaluation strategy.
Which aspects of the framework were most relevant to you?
 The detailed framework
 Generic learning outcomes
Which single aspect of the framework was most useful?
 Generic learning outcomes
What impact did the framework have on your organisation and/or project?
It gave us a clear way of considering non-cognitive learning and how we might address the impact of this
learning within our offer.
Did the learning you gained from using the framework inform future developments?
It still does since we continue to use a very similar framework.
“ILFA can be very good if you make it useful to what you do.
It was poorly received within the museums sector initially, because
people tried to apply it to activities that they had already delivered,
but if you use it as a developmental tool, it can genuinely
make programming better and more rigorous.”