Linda Young in Australia asks about the relationship between the old
UK Museums Association's professional qualification and the new
Museums Training Institute.
 
Linda - this is a long and on-going saga.  The old Museums
Association Diploma scheme is now winding down.  Candidates for that
could part qualify by successfully doing academic museums studies
programmes like ours in Manchester or Leicester's, or else by
attending short (2 or 3 week) residential in-service courses which
Leicester ran, and then did various portfolio submissions, exams etc.
That was going pretty well, but folk grumbled about the cost, it had
little credibility in the National Museums or in major departments
and mostly catered for curators in local government museums.  It was
only for curators, not for security folk, conservators etc., and was
perhaps out of date for the needs of, for example, the large
independent museums sector.
 
So after various Reports the Museums Association (professional body)
and the Museums and Galleries Commission (Govt. great-and-good
advisory quango) agreed to set up the new MTI, now in Bradford.  Its
secretariat is government funded (for how long?) but the provision it
supervises is supposed to be self financing.
 
The guiding spirits in MTI decided to devise new training standards
right across the profession, in line with UK govt. policy to
establish a new national scheme of vocational training across all
professions, based on National Vocational Qualifications, themselves
overseen by a National Council of Vocational Qualifications.  The
idea was to attack the traditional UK restriction of access to
professional status, associated with the normal route to
qualifications through higher education.  The controversial decision
was to insist that all vocational practice is best described not in
relation to traditional subject divisions, or by job descriptions,
but by the analysis and tabulation of the multitude of separate
things which folk actually do at work in each profession.  That was
an interesting notion, and MTI did a huge job in tabulating
everything which happens in museums at all staffing levels.  Thus,
one single item is 'prepare to move an object' and is described along
with all the things which have to be borne in mind in planning to
pick something up, from common-sense ones to reviewing institutional
safety policy.  (My favourite one, for museum caterers, is
'preparation of offal for immediate consumption').  There are hundreds
of them.
 
The next step was to decide which combinations (and optional
combinations) of such component functions should be considered to
comprise appropriate expertise at various levels and for different
specialists, for relevant training and then assessment schemes to be
put in place.
 
Currently, MTI have established standards and training for manual and
clerical levels of museum work, and are working on assessment.  They
are shortly due to publish the standards for curatorial and higher
levels, so that we can all work out where we might fit in.
 
The process has been drawn out and a bit fraught.  Some of us
existing providers retain reservations about the notion that all
knowledge can be assessed through the ability to carry out a
functional role, and also as to whether assessment at higher levels
will not be either impracticably complex, or else superficial.  MTI
would, at least earlier on, have liked the qualifications to become a
license to practice, but the scheme has yet to satisfy some
specialist interests (contemporary art folk, for example) and
collection specialists in major departments, who are likely to
continue to look for higher object based research qualifications.
MTI is also up against the fact that at professional levels, pretty
well all the NVQ schemes have run into either reservations like ours,
or entrenched interests, so that MTI is to some extent now going it
alone with a professional level scheme.
 
I hope that is a fair account.  For a bit more gossip (Linda) try
contacting Ann Kershaw, now teaching museum studies at Deakin (Rusden
Campus).  I don't think she's on e-mail yet, but she was with us and
knows MTI well.
 
David Phillips, programmes in art gallery and museum studies, history
of art dept., University of Manchester, UK.