Two clocks are ticking at once, and they are set to different jobs.
One sits in the municipal school (folkeskolen). 90 per cent of the current learning objectives are being abolished. New subject curricula will apply from the 2027/2028 school year. Until 15 September 2026, schools and other stakeholders can send comments on the second draft.
The other sits in the grant model for state-recognised museums. Children and young people count as a separate parameter. A museum with 8,381 children and young people as an annual average receives 0 kr. on that heading in 2026. Move the average to 8,591, and 153,567 kr. is triggered. The same children also count in ordinary visitor numbers.
The Schools Service (Skoletjenesten) has already said that abolishing the learning objectives makes room for what external learning environments do well. The grant tables are public at the Agency for Culture and Palaces (Slots- og Kulturstyrelsen). What is missing is the sentence that binds the two together.
A school programme still written as a checklist against the old learning objectives will be heavy going for the teacher in 2027. A programme that fits the new subject curricula can at the same time be the shortest route across a threshold most museums know as a number in a spreadsheet, not as a pedagogical task.
The municipal school is changing its measuring stick
The curriculum reform (fagfornyelsen) is the part of the Folkeskole Quality Programme in which 21 subject committees write new subject curricula between 2024 and 2027. The first rough draft arrived in September 2025. The second draft arrived in June 2026. The open consultation is running now, and the second trial round runs from August to the autumn holiday in 2026. The teaching guides are written in 2026 and 2027. After that the curricula take effect.
The curricula are built around a pedagogical triad: engagement, knowledge and agency. The Ministry of Children and Education (Undervisningsministeriet) stresses practice-oriented learning (praksisfaglighed), pupil involvement, and teaching that resembles something pupils can recognise outside school.
That is a different logic from the one many museums have grown used to. For years it has been good practice to write the school session against as many learning objectives as possible. The teacher needed to be able to tick boxes. The museum needed to be able to document relevance. The result was often a tightly meshed sheet that fitted the system and fitted poorly with what pupils actually do when they stand in front of an object.
When 90 per cent of the objectives disappear, that kind of sheet disappears with them. The subject knowledge has to stay. What can be dropped is the idea that a museum visit can cover a stack of competence objectives in a morning.
The external learning environment gets air
Dorte Villadsen, head of pedagogical development at the Schools Service, has put the opening like this: abolishing the many learning objectives gives the school a chance once again to make use of what external learning environments are particularly good at.
That was said to teachers, not to museum directors. Even so, it is the sentence the interpretation department should pin above the desk in autumn 2026.
A museum is good at what a classroom is bad at. Things, rooms, scale, smell, weight, the unexpected. A stone axe in the hand. A painting at the size it actually is. A factory that still smells of oil. That is practice-oriented learning, before the word became a requirement in a subject curriculum.
Villadsen also stresses the point that can be forgotten in the enthusiasm. Teaching in external learning environments still has to connect to the municipal school's subject curricula if it is to be relevant for teachers. The opening is therefore not free play. It is a shift in what has to be connected.
Several large excursion destinations are already rewriting. The National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet) kept its teaching programmes closed for about a year in order to rethink them, and opens on 7 September 2026 with a programme built around timeless themes instead of historical periods. The museum normally has around 30,000 pupils through its teaching each year. That is a signal, including for museums that do not have that volume. If the country's largest teaching museum drops the period logic, it is hard to argue that a session written for the old learning objectives should simply get a new cover year.
Open School (åben skole) has existed for ten years. The framework is there. What is new is that the measuring stick inside the subjects is changing, while museums are at the same time being measured on how many children and young people actually come.
The money counts the same children twice
The Museum Act (museumsloven) requires free admission for school pupils in a teaching context and for everyone under 18. The school class therefore does not bring in ticket revenue. In an internal meeting it can still sound like a loss. In the grant model it is a parameter.
The variable incentive grant makes up about a quarter of the allocation to state-recognised museums. Only the top half of museums on each parameter receive anything. They are placed in intervals of five per cent. The calculation is based on a three-year average, recalculated every year.
Children and young people are a separate parameter. They also count in ordinary visitor numbers. The Organisation of Danish Museums (Organisationen Danske Museer) has put it dryly: children count quantitatively twice in the incentive structure. That is not a slogan. It is arithmetic.
The broader model is set out in the article on the Danish museum reform. Here it is enough to hold on to one pair of figures.
The Agency for Culture and Palaces has published what museums needed to deliver in 2022 to 2024 to release a variable grant in 2026. For children and young people, the lower part of the table looks like this:
| Average visits, children and young people | Variable grant 2026 |
|---|---|
| 249 to 8,381 | 0 kr. |
| 8,591 to 11,415 | 153,567 kr. |
| 92,778 to 127,303 | 2,847,036 kr. |
The difference between 8,381 and 8,591 is 210 children and young people a year. In a three-year average that is, in round figures, 630 extra visits over the period. A mid-sized schools service can move that number with a couple of regular partner schools, a session that is booked twice a year, or a family exhibition that classes actually use.
153,567 kr. is not a project. It is operations. It is a post, a bus scheme, a year's workshop materials, or the time it takes to rewrite a session so that the teacher can use it after 2027.
At the top of the table lies another country. 92,778 to 127,303 children and young people trigger 2,847,036 kr. That is the National Museum's scale, not the parish museum's. The point is the same on both shelves. The parameter is visible. The thresholds are public. And the school visit, which the law has made free, is one of the few places where the museum can move the figure without raising the price.
An extra child is also an extra visitor
The other half of the double counting is ordinary visitor numbers. In the 2026 table, museums with 3,636 to 37,021 annual visitors on average sit on 0 kr. The interval 39,747 to 44,840 triggers 153,567 kr. About 2,700 extra visitors a year is the difference.
A school class of 24 pupils and two teachers is 26 visits. They count in both columns. That is why the school work cannot be parked as a pedagogical side activity while management looks at tourists and special exhibitions.
What an extra visitor is worth, once the thresholds are counted, is set out in What is an extra visitor worth?. Here is the short version for the schools service: you are not selling the ticket. You are selling the chance to sit on the right side of an interval that the agency recalculates every year.
There is a delay that is almost never said out loud. The data behind the 2026 grant are 2022 to 2024. What you do in autumn 2026 first lands in the average for 2026 to 2028 and feeds through in the grant for 2029. The subject curricula take effect in 2027/2028. The two clocks are therefore offset, but they point the same way. Anyone who waits until 2028 to rewrite the session has wasted two years of the average that decides the money.
What the teacher actually books
The teacher does not book a museum. The teacher books a morning that can be defended to an annual plan, a bus, and 24 pupils who have to get back to the after-school club (SFO).
After the curriculum reform, that defence becomes a different one. The question is no longer how many objectives you hit. The question is whether the visit provides engagement, knowledge and agency in a way the classroom cannot. Whether the pupils make something. Whether they meet a reality that is not a chapter.
That changes the brief to the interpretation department.
A session that opens with three pages of competence objectives and ends with a worksheet where pupils copy down labels is written for the system that is disappearing. A session that opens with a task pupils can solve in the room, and that can afterwards be used in Danish, history, visual arts or science, is written for the system that is coming.
The link to the subject curricula has to be honest. If you promise to cover the whole of history at the intermediate stage in two hours, the teacher sees through it. If you say that pupils can work here with sources, materials or a concrete social question, and that you have set that against the second draft, then you have something she can take to the team meeting.
The consultation running until 15 September 2026 is the practical deadline most museums overlook. You do not need to send a manifesto. You can send what you know from the bookings. Which subjects come. Which year groups. What teachers ask about that the subject curricula do not capture. What happens when a class with many bilingual pupils stands in front of a Danish text panel written at upper-secondary level.
That is input 21 subject committees will not get from a staff room alone.
Bilingual pupils and pupils who read slowly
Part of what external learning environments are good at disappears if access to the content is a dense body of text.
That is a pedagogical problem before it is a technical one. In an ordinary Danish class sit pupils who read Danish as a second language, and pupils with reading difficulties. They can be present in the room and still stand outside the story. A text panel written for the adult visitor becomes a barrier the moment the class spreads through the exhibition and the teacher cannot stand at every panel.
Audio helps here, if it is written to be heard. Several languages help, if the class actually brings those languages. That is not an argument for buying a platform. It is an argument for stopping treating the school visit as a reading exercise.
A pupil who can listen to the same story in Arabic, Ukrainian, Turkish or simpler Danish can take part in the conversation afterwards. A pupil with dyslexia can use their ears while their hands are at the display case. That is the kind of difference teachers remember when they book next year. Write the text so that it can be heard. Plain language is that work.
If you already have audio in the exhibition for tourists, ask whether it also works for a Year 5 class. Often it does not. The sentences are too long. The concepts are too heavy. There is no task. There is no pause in which the pupil can look. School audio is a different genre from visitor audio. That is worth saying out loud before anyone tries to reuse the tourist script as teaching.
What you can manage before 15 September, and what you can manage before 2027
Autumn 2026 has two different jobs. They should not be mixed together.
The first is the consultation. Read the second draft in the subjects you actually teach. Write to the ministry if you have something concrete. Talk to the teachers who already come, and ask what they are missing in the draft. It costs time, not a technical installation.
The second is the offer itself. The National Museum spent a year. Most museums do not have that luxury and do not need it. You can start with one session that is booked often, and rewrite it to the triad. Remove the list of objectives. Put in a task that can only be solved in the room. Write a teacher email of half a page that explains what the pupils do, not which objectives you cover. Test it on two classes before Christmas.
Then comes the dull part that decides the grant. Count children and young people correctly. Separate school visits from children's birthday parties if you can, so that you know what moves the figure. See where you sit relative to 8,381. If you sit below it, the question is not whether you should have a school programme. The question is whether you have one the teacher will use twice.
The phase-in of the museum reform runs to 2028. The subject curricula apply from 2027/2028. The two timelines meet in the same school years in which your three-year average is recast. That is why it is late to wait, and still early enough to get there if you start now.
A tool at the end, not an answer
The curriculum reform will not be solved by software. The grant threshold will not be solved by it either. What has to be reinvented is the conversation with the school: what pupils do in the room, how the teacher can defend the trip, and how the pupils who do not read the panel still come along.
If you already work with audio and several languages for visitors, the same approach can be used in the school session once it is written for pupils and not for tourists. Museum Guide is one way to put that kind of interpretation on the phone without an app. It is a tool. It does not replace the subject curriculum, and it does not count the children for you.
What counts is whether the class comes back once the learning objectives are gone.
Sources
- Ministry of Children and Education (Undervisningsministeriet): About the curriculum reform
- Schools Service (Skoletjenesten): The Schools Service contributes to the folkeskole theme on curriculum reform
- Folkeskolen: Popular excursion destinations look forward to dropping the learning objectives
- Folkeskolen: The National Museum has been closed for a year in order to drop the learning objectives
- Agency for Culture and Palaces: Operating grants for state-recognised museums
- The Museum Act, LBK no. 1017 of 7 July 2025
- Organisation of Danish Museums: Facts on the museum reform
About the author: Thøger Elung-Jensen is co-founder of Audioguiden and works to help museums use AI to take their interpretation to more people.