Reference Material:
So, we were founded just over ten years ago, when I was in the Royal Academy, a Museum in the center of London, with my three children, at the Aztec exhibition. I don’t know if any of you saw it. I had an older child and two younger children, twins, strapped in a pushchair, and one of my children, three years old, shouted – and I’ve never denied he shouted – he shouted, ‘Monster, monster!’ at this statue which looked just like a monster, had snakes for hair, a big beak for a nose. And, I thought, this is fantastic – I’ve got a three-year old that’s appreciating pre-Hispanic art – how good can it get?
So, I bent down and I said, ‘Yes, it looks just like a monster’. And, at that moment, a room warden came over, a gallery assistant came over and said we were being too noisy, and threw us out.
Wrong family. I was, at that time, a journalist with The Guardian newspaper, and two days later wrote a big piece in The Guardian about being thrown out of the Royal Academy. What was really interesting was, by the end of that day, we had had, at the paper, over 500 emails from other families saying, ‘Museums aren’t working for us. Let’s try and make it work’.
So, that’s what we did. In The Guardian, we set up a campaign. We called it the Kids in Museums campaign, but it didn’t really exist. It was just a few pages. We ran loads of stories on it; I began touring the country talking about how to make your museum family friendly; I was a journalist.
I was called in to see the then director of the National Gallery in London, and I’ll never forget this moment, when he called me in and said, ‘We really like this Kids in Museums campaign, and we’ve been talking on our board about it, and we have some ideas of how we might work together, and I’d like you to take them back to your team.
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Sample Answer:
A mother, a journalist with The Guardian newspaper, wrote an article in the newspaper complaining about her experience of being thrown out of a museum because of her kids shouting in the museum. She received emails from families about the same experience.They set up The Kids in Museums Campaign. Although it didn’t exist at first, the speaker began touring the country, talking about how to make museums family friendly. (70 words)
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