How one Roman jar inspired an award-winning project between 20 museums

Out of the Box is a free website that pools objects from twenty museums into free, ready-to-use classroom resources.

It features short videos and a no-prep classroom activity around each object, and then points teachers towards the local museum that holds relevant objects.

The project won Partnership of the Year at the Museums + Heritage Awards in May. Judges called its success “no mean feat”. They praised a shared digital platform none of the partners could have achieved alone, increasing access to 250 objects on a shoestring.

 

What teachers asked for

“[Schools] were telling us that they weren’t using objects, they weren’t engaging with their museums. And we kept hitting this stumbling block; they were telling us that they couldn’t afford coaches,” explains Rosie Barrett, the freelance development consultant who led the project.

“They wanted something that they could use in their classrooms and that was completely free, that would signpost them to the museums, and which they could integrate without having to plan whole projects.”

Piloting with five museums over roughly two years produced the first iteration of a solution.

“[Teachers] loved that there were little things that they could do a starter activity on, or they could do an assembly on, or a tutor group discussion. They didn’t have to massively change things.”

The problem one museum can’t solve

“The problem when you’re a teacher and you’re trying to find resources is you’re looking for, say, the Stone Age, and there’s a museum down the road that does the Stone Age, but then there’s another museum in another place that does the Victorians, and then somewhere else does the Romans.”

The efficiency of shared resources at the heart of the project almost emerged by accident, from a piece of Roman pottery.

Barrett explains: “We suddenly realised that we’d made all these resources about Roman pots, but there were loads of different Roman pots all over Yorkshire. So we could make one set of resources and activity ideas, and then we could include all local Roman pots.”

“Now, every school that was near one of these museums was using the same resources, but personalised for their particular pots. [Students] had a hyper-local object, and the feeling of really bespoke resources, but actually we’d pull together resources from different places.”

A video made with a design technology class on single use plastic bottles led to the realisation “that every single town has a stoneware bottle with its own name on.

“You can have the same discussion and the same debates about plastics, but you can say to the kids ‘…and this is what our bottle looked like’.”

Continued growth

The partnership expanded by word of mouth after an airing at a Museum Development Yorkshire forum, helped by local government reorganisation. When the North Yorkshire councils merged, they made the project a priority for the cultural team.

The initial build was deliberately minimal. “We got a web developer to literally develop a template for the objects. He set up the very basic infrastructure of the front page, and uploaded the first 20 objects. And then we took over at that point.” Barrett, her freelancers and North Yorkshire Council’s cultural team now add and edit pages themselves.

Since the award in May, the website has expanded its partnered museums, now offering object-connected learning resources with museums across the UK.

“The museums who’ve been in the partnership have discovered more about each other’s collections and have realised they’ve got more in common than they knew,” said Barret.

Every page on the Out of the Box website ends by sending users back to the collection. “It tells you about your local museum, whether an object’s on display, whether you can go and see it, whether you can borrow it in a loan box, if you can go and do a workshop about it.”

On winning the award

Barrett collected the award at the Museums + Heritage Awards ceremony earlier this year.

“All week, literally everyone in the museum sector had said to me, ‘isn’t it lovely that you’ve been shortlisted, Rosie? Just go along and have a nice evening’.” But Barrett was confident of the project’s worthiness, “it’s such a strong partnership”, she said.

“It wasn’t about one museum, it was about all the museums and how much they’d learned from each other.”

That conclusion has become one of the founding principles of the project as it continues to grow.

“Absolutely no way could any one museum have produced something like this, because I don’t think anybody has the capacity to do that amount of consultation.”

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Out of the Box was developed with North Yorkshire Council’s cultural team and funded by Arts Council England. Entries for the Museums + Heritage Awards 2027 open on 2 November 2026.