School visits and resources

Yes, the museum is free for everyone.

Yes, self-guided visits for groups of 15 or more must give advance notice. Simply fill out this request form. 

Presentations must be booked at least four weeks in advance and are subject to availability.

Schools can make a maximum of four bookings in an academic year.

We do not have a café but there are places nearby to buy food. For hygiene reasons, and to protect our collections, we do not allow eating or drinking in the museum.

Yes, our offering for home education groups is the same as for other schools. For a presentation, there is a minimum of 15 attendees from the same year group. If students are of mixed age groups or there are fewer than 15 students in your group, then a self-guided visit with free activity sheets is more suitable.

The safety and security of our staff and visitors is important to us. Hand sanitiser is available throughout the Museum and we highly recommend that this, or our hand washing facilities, are used during your visit. This is particularly important when handling the interactive parts of our collection, for example whilst lifting the gold bar or attempting to crack our safe! 

Before your trip, please read our risk-assessment information about visiting with a school group.

We want everyone to enjoy their visit to our Museum. If you would like to organise a talk for people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), please send us an email at education@bankofengland.co.uk so we can discuss your requirements further.

All school groups are very welcome to the visit the Bank of England Museum, which is free to enter. We’re delighted to welcome groups from both independent and state schools.

We have a small museum with limited resources, and therefore have to prioritise some of our work. We offer short presentations of around 45 minutes in the museum to state school groups on the basics of the Bank’s role and its history. We do not offer presentations to any school groups on the current ‘Slavery and the Bank’ exhibition but a teaching resource is available to download from our website. Like all of the Bank’s education resources, this is free for any school to access.

Economics as an academic subject is less widely taught in non-selective state schools than independent schools. To put this into context, about half of comprehensive schools offer economics at A Level, compared to about three-quarters of independent schools.

The statistics at degree level are more striking: over 7% of independently educated male undergraduates are studying economics, compared to 1% for female undergraduates from state schools. See this paper from the Institute for Fiscal Studies for more details.

We are supporting efforts by the Royal Economic Society to promote the subject to under-represented groups through its Discover Economics campaign. It aims to widen access to economics as an academic subject and the wider profession for under-represented groups, which includes women, state-school educated pupils and ethnic minorities.

The Bank of England adopts a data-led targeted approach to its outreach and education activities, reflecting key guidance from the Social Mobility Foundation. In 2022 the Bank submitted to the Employer Index Report and featured in the top 75 employers (placed at number 39).

Our objective here is not to deny access to any particular group to our educational resources. As noted above, the overwhelming majority of the latter are available to all. By providing short additional introductory presentations to state-school students, our aim is to help encourage a similar interest in economics amongst them as we already see in their independently-educated counterparts.

Yes. Please email us at education@bankofengland.co.uk or give us a ring on 020 3461 5545. Our phoneline is monitored from 10am to 4pm, Monday through Friday. If the line is busy, please leave a message and we will call you back.

You may also want to take a look at our general FAQs on our Plan your visit page.