Following the announcement in March that MLA South East will cease operations by April 2009, we have been working closely with the South East Museum Hub to devise alternative management arrangements for the Renaissance-funded museum development programmes in the region. The responsibility for managing the programmes for the wider museums community, including the network of Museum Development Officers, their small grants scheme, training and pre-Accreditation advice, will be transferred to the Hub by November 2008.
24 August sees the UK becoming an Olympiad nation with the Handover of the Olympic Flag from Beijing to London. Later this summer there are two more key celebrations and The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) would like you to get involved.
The second stage of the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) consultation has been launched. CAA will be an innovative way of drawing together information to show how well residents are being served by their local public services.
Operational Area: Local Government, Sustainable Communities
The CIPFA Public Libraries Consultation paper is now available to local authorities. This paper gives the opportunity for authorities to rate information in recently released performance benchmarking documentation and also whether highlighted information should be included in the CIPFA statistics in future.
23 August is the UNESCO International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. Events are being held to commemorate this event across the country and the department for culture, media and sport (DCMS) have produced an events guide.
Operational Area: Cultural Entitlement, Equality and Diversity
Older People’s Day is on 1 October. There are plenty of opportunities to get involved and put on an event to celebrate. The Department for Work and Pensions has put together a "Full of Ideas" Toolkit and it is now available to download.
A free little book published by Defra provides a statistical overview of the country’s progress in tackling key economic, social and environmental issues, by bringing together an extensive range of indicators that can literally fit in your pocket. They cover a wide range of topics of everyday concern such as health, housing, jobs, crime, education, and our environment, all of which may affect whether we can live more sustainably in the future.
The number of South East schools using the region’s museums continues to increase and the growth in secondary school use is particularly significant, increasing by 14% since 2004-05 to 57% in 2006-07. These are two key findings from the latest report on South East schools participation now available on the MLA South East website.
MLA South East commissioned Roger Tym & Partners (RTP) in Spring 2008 to explore the role museums, libraries and archives play in the wider visitor economy and quantify the economic value of the museums, libraries and archives sector. The full report and an accompanying In Brief ‘ are now available on our website. We would like to thank all our colleagues in the sector and in tourism for contributing to the research by taking part in interviews conducted by RTP.
