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Family Friendly Museum Award

Our Family Friendly Museum Award celebrates museums, galleries and heritage attractions that go the extra mile to provide an excellent family friendly experience.

We launched the Family Friendly Museum Award in 2004 to recognise the venues that are most welcoming, fun, and accessible for families.

Each year we award the prize to one museum, gallery, historic home or heritage site that has made outstanding efforts to welcome children and families and respond to their feedback. It is the only museum award in the UK to be judged by families.

The overall winner of the Family Friendly Museum Award 2023 is Craven Museum in Skipton Town Hall. The winners of the award categories were:

Read more about the winners for the Family Friendly Museum Award 2023.

Find out what makes a Family Friendly Museum Award winner in the video below.

How do we nominate our museum for the award?

Nominations for the Family Friendly Museum Award can be made by anyone – children, parents, carers, grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins – or museums can apply themselves.

We welcome nominations for museums of all sizes, from national museums with teams of curators, to tiny local galleries run by volunteers.

If you are applying on behalf of your museum, please read our Award Guidelines for full Terms and Conditions before you apply.

We have a range of nomination materials to help you promote nominations from your family visitors, including a poster with QR code, family feedback form, social media graphic and web copy template.

Nominations for the Family Friendly Museum Award 2024 are now open until 3 June 2024 at 5pm.

Make a nomination now!

What are the award categories?

The categories for the Kids in Museums Family Friendly Museum Award 2024 are:

  • Best Small Museum: up to 100k visits
  • Best Medium Museum: 100-400k visits
  • Best Large Museum: 400k+ visits
  • Best Accessible Museum
  • New: Best Museum Youth Group

This new award category will celebrate museum staff and young people working together in a long-term, meaningful and impactful way, such as through youth panels or forums, young volunteer schemes, and history or art clubs. We want to hear about how you are supporting young people to engage with heritage, have an impact on your site, develop their skills and have fun. Your group should have been running for a minimum of six months (since at least October 2023). The category will be open to museum applications only and judged by an expert panel.

The size categories are based on your visitor numbers from 2023. Don’t worry if you’re not sure about the size category when you’re nominating – we’ll check all museums are in the right one before shortlisting.

How is my application judged?

Our expert panel of museum professionals whittles our nominations down to a shortlist. In previous years, we have received as many as 860 nominations for 80 different museums.

The Best Museum Youth Group category will be judged entirely by expert panel.

Undercover family judges visit all other shortlisted museum during the summer holidays and assess them on how well they meet our Kids in Museums Manifesto. Their experiences will decide the winner for each category.

Our expert panel will then pick an overall winner from the four category winners visited by families.

Key dates

Nominations for the Family Friendly Museum Award 2024 open on Tuesday 19 March and close at 5pm on Monday 3 June.

Our expert panel will meet in June with the shortlist announced at the end of the month.

The Family Friendly Museum Award 2024 winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in October.

Find out more

Read more about the National Emergency Services Museum and other previous winners of the Family Friendly Museum Award.

If you’d like to find out more about the award, sign up to our newsletter below or contact us: [email protected]

FAQs

  • Can I make more than one nomination or application?

    As a member of the public, you can nominate as many museums as you wish in each category.

    Museums can enter multiple categories, excluding the different size categories.

    You will need to submit a separate online form for each nomination or application.

  • What if I can’t use the online form?

    We prefer all nominations to be made via the online form where possible.

    If you cannot use the form, please email us to request an alternative format: [email protected]

  • How can I sign up to be an undercover family judge for the award?

    If you would like to be an undercover family judge during the summer holidays and visit our shortlist, please sign up to our Family Mailing List to be notified about taking part.

    We are keen to hear from families with additional needs to be judges in all categories. In particular, we want all the judges for the Best Accessible Museum category to have lived experience of the access provision they are judging.

  • How much does it cost to enter?

    There is no charge to enter the award.

  • Can I submit supporting materials for my museum application?

    The focus of your application should be the online application form. If you wish, you can submit further information in a single curated PDF document of no more than 10 sides of A4. This could include information on your family events programme, statistics, resources or family feedback.

    You are also welcome to submit a separate PDF of family feedback forms if you have used our printable feedback forms on site during the nomination period.

    These should be submitted via email: [email protected]

    No other supporting materials will be accepted.