Museums, Galleries and Collections Fund

The Museum, Galleries and Collections Fund supports museums and galleries in the higher education (HE) sector that have research significance beyond their home institution.

The fund supports universities where the cost of providing this service to the wider research community incurs a significant cost beyond what is needed to meet the needs of an institution’s own researchers.

The fund was previously managed for HEFCE by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Our support so far

In 2011-12 we provided £10.45 million to support 31 university museums and galleries. In the last five years, our funding has helped university museums to:

increase public visits by 95 per cent to 4 million a year
increase further and higher education visits by 186 per cent to 263,000 a year
increase leverage of non-HE funding by 179 per cent to £20.34 million
make 27,578 loans to other institutions
create new records for 1.93 million objects.

Review of HEFCE funding for museums and galleries

In 2010 we completed a review of our funding for university museums and galleries, led by Sir Muir Russell.

Higher education institutions wishing to be considered for funding were invited to make written submissions. The review considered how far the activities of the museums and galleries met core HEFCE policy aims and are activities of a kind that HEFCE funding should support.

Three main criteria were developed to support this consideration:

provision of a service to the wider research community at significant cost beyond what is needed to meet the needs of an institution's own researchers
provision of a high-quality teaching and learning experience to the wider HE community
addressing HEFCE's widening participation objective to promote and provide the opportunity of successful higher education to everyone who can benefit from it.