Our school year

By Rebecca Preedy, Learning and Engagement Officer

School’s out, and what a year it’s been! After a fantastic year of over 400 workshops, community activities and school visits, we reached over 6,900 people with our inclusive sessions. Here are just a few of the brilliant things schools have been doing with The MERL this academic year.

School sessions

This year we welcomed many schools to the museum and offered nearly 80 on- and off-site sessions. Using the collections to engage with and support the National Curriculum, we welcomed everyone from early years to further education students with a hands-on experience of rural England.

With sessions ranging from the Outdoor Schoolroom – where the herbs and flora in our garden help students understand plants and their properties – to Evacuee Experience in the Countryside – where children hear a first-hand account of evacuee life in the Second World War – our sessions are key to the breadth of our educational offer here at The MERL.

We’re also so pleased to have been included in Art Fund’s 2025-2026 Museum Trips Guide, ranking us among the top 20 museums for school trips across the UK!

Exploring Gypsy, Roma and Traveller histories

This year we have continued to promote Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritage throughout GRT History Month (June) and beyond with a programme of outreach and events celebrating Gypsy, Roma and Traveller histories and experiences in rural life.

Our work took us to schools to share and raise awareness of Gypsy, Romany and Traveller communities and their heritage. Not only did the workshops help to inform children about Gypsy, Roma and Traveller histories, but teachers also noted that it helped their children of Gypsy, Roma or Traveller heritage feel represented, celebrated and valued.

This summer we launched a new permanent exhibition exploring Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritages in our Making Rural England gallery, The Long Road. The exhibition was curated by Dr Jo Clement, poet and MERL Fellow, in consultation with local schools. Using objects and archive material from the Robert Dawson collection, The Long Road includes our fantastic newly acquired vardo, or waggon, and the ‘Unfinished Painting’ .The exhibition officially opened as part of our GRT Heritage Day 2025, an event which included music, crafts, and storytelling.

The Long Road has been used in on-site sessions with schools, helping them to complete an Arts Awards qualification while thinking about travel and transport in rural life and the lives of people living on the road. It has also inspired a new Homes in the Past session for primary schools.

Englefield Schools Days

In June, we were delighted to be invited back to the Englefield Estate for their annual Schools Days.

This year we focused our sessions on the environment and what the past can teach us about being sustainable. Through handling objects such as a Victorian jelly mould, a butter churn, and a milk bottle, the children could think about whether these items were more or less sustainable than their modern counterparts and use this as inspiration for coming up with ideas about being more eco-conscious in their own lives.

Against the nature-rich backdrop of the estate, with the sun blazing, this was the perfect setting for a day of sustainable fun.

Inclusion

Our learning programmes at The MERL are for everyone and we want to ensure that all students have the opportunity to participate and engage. Over the year we have prioritised making our programmes’ content more multisensory and inclusive, and working with teachers to ensure that activities are accessible for all their students. We have continued to develop our work with SEND schools, developing our emphasis on workplace and skills for living.

We produced a new programme with Addington School as part of their Lifelong Leisure topic. Through the programme we explored a wider range of lifelong leisure activities (not just sport) that are local, accessible and have potential to inspire a lifelong love of culture. We had weekly sessions with similar structures but changing content, with flexible and differing levels of scaffolded support. This six-week series of workshops provided students with an opportunity to build routines and gain confidence in a new environment.

This is just a small taster of the brilliant educational events, workshops, and programmes we have led over the last year, none of which could have happened without our fantastic school visitors. And there’s still so much more to come!

If you’ve enjoyed one of our workshops this year, don’t hesitate to get in touch and book again for the coming year. We’d also love to hear from you if you’ve never been to The MERL before. Whether for a session or a project, we cover a vast variety of topics which hit many national curriculum points in a fun and engaging way, with over 90% of teachers this year rating our workshops 5* for their overall enjoyment.