The 2025 academic year — twelve programme launches, five suspensions, fifty rating changes.

The new programmes launched in 2025.

Twelve programmes launched at indexed museums during the 2025 academic year. The GEM launched two — the new "Family Fridays" programme in March 2025 and an extended workshop programme in October 2025. The Coptic Museum launched the "Coptic feast day open hour" family programme in May 2025. The Greco-Roman Museum launched the "Greek-Roman family weekend" monthly programme in February 2025. The Nubian Museum launched two new school-group programmes ("Identity and place" for secondary and "The Nubian story" for primary upper) in September 2025 ahead of the academic year. The Mummification Museum launched the junior version of the mummification workshop in April 2025 to address the primary-lower gap that the main workshop had not been suited to. Two smaller-museum launches at the Sohag Museum (Heritage Sunday) and the Imhotep Museum (extension of the existing programme to include a family-friendly afternoon slot) round out the year's launches.

The programme suspensions.

Five programmes were suspended during 2025. The Museum of Islamic Art's family-day programme was suspended in February 2025 after persistent quality issues that the museum's education team acknowledged but was not in a position to remedy without staffing changes that have not yet happened. The Mallawi Museum's "Middle Egypt pottery" workshop ran only intermittently across the year and was effectively suspended by the end of 2025 (the museum has not formally announced suspension but the workshop has not been bookable since November 2025). Three smaller programme suspensions at the Luxor Museum, the Cairo Egyptian Museum and the Coptic Museum all reflected staffing changes rather than institutional decisions to discontinue.

Rating changes across the year.

Fifty rating changes were issued across the four programme categories in 2025. Upgrades: sixteen programmes were upgraded to a higher rating during the year, primarily in the secondary segment where the addition of teacher-observer feedback from new network members allowed more confident rating decisions. Downgrades: twenty-three programmes were downgraded; the most common reason was the documented gap between published programme description and observed delivery, where reader-observer reports established that the museum's stated programme had drifted from the museum's published description. Mixed changes: eleven programmes had rating changes that varied across the age bands (a programme upgraded for secondary but downgraded for primary lower, for example).

The corrections log.

Ninety-eight corrections were issued in 2025 — the largest annual total in the cooperative's history, reflecting the maturity of the reader-observer network and the more detailed verification that the larger team now performs. The corrections distributed across the four categories roughly in proportion to the programme count: forty-three primary, twenty-eight secondary, sixteen workshop, eleven family-day. Approximately sixty percent of corrections came from museum education teams notifying us of changes (the highest such proportion in cooperative history), reflecting the increasing engagement of museum education teams with the index as the index has become an established reference point.

The 2026 outlook.

The 2026 academic year opens in September with the new index version reflecting the September methodology revision. The major structural change for 2026 is the expansion of the teacher-observer network — we are recruiting fifteen additional secondary teachers to bring the network to a target forty-three active observers. The cooperative is also planning the launch of an Arabic-language version of the index alongside the existing English version; the Arabic version is in draft and is expected to launch in October 2026 if the editorial-board September meeting approves the launch. No major changes to the methodology or the rating framework are planned for 2026.

The reader-observer network growth.

The cooperative's reader-observer network grew from twenty-three active observers at the start of 2025 to forty active observers by year-end — a sixty-five percent increase that reflects the most concentrated network growth in the cooperative's history. The growth came primarily from the secondary-teacher recruitment effort that Tarek led across the spring and autumn terms, with eleven new secondary teachers joining the network. The honorarium pool expansion (from EGP 200 to EGP 240 per accepted report, applied retroactively across the year) was the cooperative's recognition that the observers' contribution warranted a real-terms increase against Egyptian inflation; the increase was funded from the year's subscription growth.

The full archive of the year's monthly bulletins, quarterly indexes and corrections log is available to School and Institutional subscribers. The methodology sets out the rating framework. The four programme files — primary, secondary, workshops, family-day events — contain the detail.