What. A. Blast! Our first ever
Takeover Day at Castleford Museum went better than we could have ever hoped. After
months of planning, a few sleepless nights, marvellous support from Kids in
Museums and lots of reassurance from our excellent museums team, we managed to
get through the entire day without a hitch.
We first began planning Takeover
Day, way back at the start of the year. It was an event that we were both
really keen to do and we felt it would be a good way to give something back to
our regular young visitors. They always want to help us with workshop ideas so
we thought; why not give them a chance to work for the museum for real and see
what it’s actually like?
Our young people arrived at 10am
and were thrown straight in at the deep end! We gave them a presentation on the
different duties of museum professional, such as curator, exhibition designer,
learning officer etc., and asked them which role they would like to take on. They
then had 10 minutes to collectively agree on a theme for our day, which turned
out to be: Vivian Nicholson, our very own ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’ legend!
After some research they planned and designed a new trail, 2 workshop activities, a mini exhibition, and wrote scripts for some role play.
As well as this, they welcomed visitors with great enthusiasm, made themselves ‘Happy to help’ staff badges and excitedly updated social media.
All this before lunch!
After lunch parents and guardians
were welcomed back to participate in all the activities on offer. Some parents were
making clay microphones and Vivian Nicholson inspired masks, while others were
being assisted with our new museum hunt ‘Viv’s Missing Notes’. Our young people really got stuck in engaging
with visitors, answering questions, assisting our toddler visitors with the
activities and generally being magnificent museum professionals. 
The feedback from our parents/guardians
was really positive and they all said they’d had a great time.
(Adele, parent of one of our young
people)
(Adele, parent of one of our young
people)
Overall it was a fantastic
experience, not just for our young people, who got to run the museum for a day,
but for us as Front of House staff. It was an absolute privilege working with
our young people. It was heart-warming to watch their confidence grow through
talking to the public and leading craft workshops. We saw them embrace
team-working, conduct fair decision-making, take on responsibility and develop
their planning skills. By the end of the day, we really felt like we had got to
know them.
If there is one thing we have
learnt through Takeover Day, it would be that the young people in our communities
want to get involved in the museum,
you just have to give them the opportunity to surprise you. (And that, generally, young people aren’t as scary as you first think!)
