Your support: success stories
The Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Foundation

In 2013, the Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Foundation made a generous pledge to support new access programmes at the British Museum for a three-year period. These will provide tailored activities that enable children with special educational needs (SEN) and adults with learning disabilities or mental ill health to have positive, creative interactions with the Museum environment.

The new programmes, launching in 2014, are:

Explore – a Museum programme for adults with learning disabilities

Working in partnership with London-based community groups, this programme will facilitate interactions between the participants and the Museum’s curators, educators and objects. It will provide a museum course for two groups of participants per year, drawing on a diverse range of learning methods including object handling, storytelling, discussion and creative exploration.

Experiencing the Museum – for children with special educational needs

This programme will enable students with SEN to experience the British Museum through stimulating the senses. They will engage with ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Britain and other cultures and periods through sight, sound, smell and touch. These taught, object-based activities aim to raise the confidence of students and build on their knowledge of the world around them, at the same time allowing the Museum to pilot new educational approaches.

The British Museum is extremely grateful to the Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Foundation for making this work possible.

Find out more about booking school groups into an Experiencing the Museum session 

Find out more about the Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Foundation