The FAST Museum offers educational tours for all student ages presenting a unique insight into Farnborough’s rich aviation heritage and the fascinating artefacts in our collection.

Our Educational Tours are:

• Inexpensive:
  • • Primary School Groups pay a deposit of £50 per session (morning or afternoon) at the time of booking. This is refundable provided the visit/session goes ahead but, if you wish, it can be turned into a charitable donation for FAST.
    • Secondary School and other groups cost £6 per child.
    • Accompanying Adults are free.
• STEM Accredited – Tour Guides are all STEM Ambassadors or training to become one (For more details about STEM visit: www.stem.org.uk)
• For all ages – from pre-school to University students or Apprentices
• Flexible – we can tailor a tour to meet your requirements

We currently only offer daytime tours of 2 hours which can be booked on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

We also offer Educational Tours to The Farnborough Wind Tunnels. Let us know if you are interested.

The majority of our tours are in this age range as the tour complements the work done in Transport and Local History units.

So what actually happens on a typical 2 hour Educational Visit?
Let’s take a Year 2 visit as an example:

We start the Tour with a group photo in front of the Cody Statue in front of the Museum.

Following the welcome the pupils are told the five rules for the visit. Given that three of these are “No Running” it is easy to determine which aspect of potential behaviour causes us the greatest concern!

The pupils then have a brief (20-25 minutes) history lesson about aviation generally and at Farnborough specifically. This includes Samuel Cody as well as Tilly Shilling – always handy to know who the local Wetherspoon is named after.

And then the 45-60 minute tour begins. The pupils are divided into groups of 7 or 8 pupils with a volunteer guide, and tour the Cody Pavilion, the Museum, the Air Raid Shelter and the aircraft. We call it the touchy-feely tour because we encourage pupils to touch certain exhibits to reinforce their learning.

We start the final half-hour with a brief explanation of how wings work, the names of parts of an aircraft and the six degrees of freedom it has. They learn about port and starboard, as well as roll, pitch and yaw.

We end the visit with a paper airplane competition and photos with Samuel Cody (a cardboard cutout obviously).

Schools are welcome to stay for lunch – please bring your own – in the Cody Pavilion by prior agreement.

As the school departs we get feedback about the visit and wave goodbye. A certificate is provided for each child, summarising their experiences on the tour (see right).

Please email: education@airsciences.org.uk if you are interested in booking an educational visit.