Projects

Students (and some staff too!) are very excited to be taking part in a collaborative project involving the forthcoming exhibition "This is what you get" at the Ashmolean. It will be the first exhibition in a public gallery to bring together the visual work of Stanley Donwood and Radiohead's Thom Yorke.

The Ashmolean state: More than 120 works will be on display, with many of the paintings, drawings and digital art specifically created for Thom Yorke’s internationally acclaimed band Radiohead, formed in Oxford in 1985.

A small group of Year 11 and 12s have been invited to attend a session in March where the Ashmolean will present their ideas for the exhibition, and students will be able to offer feedback and suggestions to be incorporated into the exhibition. Students have been asked, before the visit, to choose a Radiohead album cover or song and prepare a creative response: this could be a poem, piece of artwork, or song. The Ashmolean is particularly keen on these responses being collaborative projects, since the exhibition itself is focused on a collaboration.

These responses will be shared at the session, and will then form part of the exhibition, and be hosted in a digital gallery. Students will then be invited to the exhibition when it launches!


The Rumble Museum at Cheney School is excited to be working with the History of Science Museum on an exciting project to create some new technology displays in our new cabinets on the first floor of their Lane Building.

The school museum already houses a collection of technology items in our Technology through Time Collection. In order to develop our collections, we are calling for members of the wider community to loan or donate items to our collections. We already have a 1950s Bakelite Television, 1930s gramophone, a 1950s radio, a electric typewriter and a 1990s mobile phone and many other items in our collection, which are all on display at Cheney School. 

We are interested in any sort of technical item from any era, right up to present day, so if you have anything you'd be happy to loan or donate, please get in touch on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

We are also looking for stories, memories and experiences of using these technologies to create an oral history of the collection. We are running a Collection and Exhibition Afternoon on 19th March. If you would like to share any memories or stories, please get in touch.

The Museum of Climate Hope project is an exciting new project led by Bill Finnegan from the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment. The project will create a digital trail across the six different University of Oxford locations in the city.  There will be one object in each place. Cheney’s  Rumble Museum has been invited to be the seventh location for the trail!

In order to choose our own objects for the trail, our Museum Councils drew up a shortlist of five possible objects to include in the trail. Every student at Cheney then had the opportunity to vote on which object best represents the theme of Climate Hope!

We also gave the wider community the chance to cast their vote on the five shortlisted objects from our collections. The objects chosen can be viewed below with text from our Museum Council students on why they have chosen the items.

In autumn 2022, students in 8* and 8Up classes at Cheney began an exciting Rumble Museum project delivered in partnership with the University of Oxford, Dr Philippa Matthews, Dr Sally Frampton and local science-based artist Dr Lizzie Burns.

It explored the use of vaccines in the past and present, as well as ideas about the future of vaccines too. It was part of a wider project, Infecting Minds, which was also delivered in two schools in South Africa, and ideas and artwork were shared between all schools involved. The project ran every Monday throughout October, November and December, and included a trip to explore plants and medicine at the Botanical Gardens. Students created artwork, posters and craft items in response to the wide variety of ideas and information about the past, present and future of vaccines.

In our first session, the groups drew self-portraits. They were then invited to express their thoughts about vaccines. After this, the group looked at a range of artefacts from the Covid pandemic, which have become very familiar in our daily lives, and to imagine what archaeologists from the future might make of these items. They included facemasks, lateral flow tests, and posters encouraging people to get vaccinated. Finally, everyone decorated a facemask with their own designs in response to the ideas and thoughts from the session.

We are delighted to announce that the Rumble Museum has been awarded a Wild Escape grant for an exciting project engaging primary school children with our natural history collections.

In partnership with the Oxford Natural History Museum, we have run tree trail tours and workshops for primary school groups on butterflies and biodiversity on site at the Rumble Museum. These workshops and trails introduced the children to the role and lifespan and homes of the British butterflies in our Rumble Museum collection, and explored the role of the butterflies in a biodiverse environment.

The children then take part in workshops run back at their own school which supported them in writing stories imagining these butterflies in our trees on site in the more nature-rich future. They have also created artwork for their stories.

These stories and artwork are being displayed in a special exhibition at the Natural History Museum on 22nd April to celebrate Earth Day.

We have greatly enjoyed working with Barton Park Primary, St Andrew's Primary and Wood Farm Primary on this project, and with Chris Jarvis from the Natural History Museum who ran fascinating workshops for the groups.

You can view the artwork and stories which the children have produced online here (this is still being added to).

The Wild Escape is made possible by lead support from Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants, with additional support from Art Fund

In June and July 2021, our Year Eight Museum Council each chose a favourite butterfly from our British Butterflies Collection and worked with local mosaicist Clare Goodall to create individual mosaics of each of the butterflies. The group installed the mosaics on an outside wall on C Block over the summer holidays.

From left to right, the butterflies are: brimstone, peacock, comma, common blue, red admiral, small copper, holly blue, chalkhill blue, black-veined white (now extinct in Britain), orange tip, wall brown, and large white.

From left to right, our student artists are: Tess Gimson, Scarlett Parsler, Cherie Liu, Rachel Robinson, Anna Deakin, Drew Milne, Catriona Baxter, Izzy Wearden, Imo Robinson Vilain, Adam Diesel, Logan Cameron, and Binamra Shrestha.