Reshaping Accreditation: What’s in scope for 2025
March 13, 2025Isabel Wilson, Senior Manager for the Accreditation Scheme with Arts Council England, looks at the work ahead for the newly-announced redesign
Accreditation has helped build trust in museums for over 35 years. Getting Accredited status by meeting the Standard is a huge achievement to be proudly displayed. It’s an endorsement that a museum is a responsible custodian of public collections, managing them for people to enjoy now and in the future.
The central feature of Accreditation is the Standard – the handbook covering the core parts of a well-run museum. It has a range of requirements relating to governance and management, planning and finances, collections management, and visitor experience.
The importance of Accreditation is reflected in its longevity and participation. It’s a model for similar schemes overseas, and 1738 UK museums are currently Accredited, with well over 100 working towards applying for the status of Accreditation.
But we have heard from you that there are some aspects of Accreditation that could be improved or updated to reflect the 2025 operating environment – which is vastly different to 35 years ago. We recognise there are opportunities for us to improve users’ experiences of the Accreditation process.
We want to further the benefits of participation. At its very best, Accreditation provides a useful check and helps those running museums and those with oversight to be accountable, take stock, and plan for a responsive and relevant museum. We need to make sure we are asking the right questions to help you do this.
That’s why – as Emmie Kell, Director of Museums and Cultural Property at Arts Council England outlined in this blog in January – we are embarking on a redesign of Accreditation this year. We have heard from some of you about your experiences and feedback on the Accreditation Scheme and we will want to hear more as we get underway with this work.
During 2025, with additional funding from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, we will be:
Reviewing and updating the outcomes for Accreditation: What do we want to achieve as a sector from Accreditation, what is its unique purpose and how do we focus the scheme on this?
Updating the Accreditation Standard: The Standard has not been updated since 2018, with the intervening period seeing huge changes for museums, the wider cultural sector and society. Work to collaboratively review and update the Standard will follow on from an initial discovery phase – we will update on the progress of this work on the Accreditation webpages.
Redesigning the process for application and assessment: Listening to user experiences to understand how to make the processes for application, assessment and award less onerous will be a top priority.
Improving use of data: Improving data capture, quality and insights for participating museums, UK Accreditation partners and other stakeholders.
We will be talking to museums throughout the process of the Accreditation redesign; there will be many opportunities to contribute your thoughts and experiences.
We will be keeping the scheme open as usual and will make sure that we communicate regularly about how our plans develop. In the meantime, keep an eye on our Accreditation webpages here for updates on the Redesign throughout 2025.