AT theirJanuary meeting the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum approved a paper (which they had appar- ently been given only fifteen minutes to read) outlining the most radical restructuring of the Museum since its foundation. It might seem premature to comment on the version of this paper circulated to staff- especially since it has not been made publicly available - were it not for subsequent events so disturbing that they override normal conventions of polite discussion. A week after the Trustees' meeting nine senior curatorial staff, including four Keepers and two Deputy Keepers, were given two weeks to decide whether to accept 'voluntary' redundancies, and eight have since decided to go. The loss to curatorial expertise is enormous, and the damage to morale in the Museum and to its international reputation has been incalculable. It appears that the Trustees were not consulted about the scale or details of the redundancy plans - which were worked out subsequently in consultation with Treasury officials and the Office of Arts and Libraries - despite the fact that such plans demonstrably fall within the Trustees' responsibility for policy making.

The aim of the proposed restructuring is that curatorial responsibility for the 'management' of objects (handling, storage, conservation) should gradually be phased out, and that the collections should eventually be in the hands of 'managers' answerable to the Registrar. The scholarly functions of curators will be hived off into a separate 'research' department, whose aims and mode of operation have yet to be defined. As an interim arrangement, the Indian, Far Eastern and Drawings departments will continue to exist, while the 'materials'-based Western departments will be amalgamated into two mega-departments - Textiles, Furniture and Interior Design on the one hand, and Ceramics, Metalwork and Sculpture on the other. Eventually, however, it seems to be envisaged that the Registrar's department will swallow up the collections altogether.

An organisational structure separating 'housekeeping' from research has already been put into operation at the Science Museum and the National Maritime Museum, and this model is immediately recognisable in the new proposals for the V & A. But, whatever the merits of these other cases, it is impossible to see how unified 'object management' without curators or specialised departments could be practicable for the vast and heterogeneous collections of the V & A, which include the officially recognised National Collections of Western Sculpture, Silver, Miniatures and Water-colours, not to mention a Ceramics department larger than the entire French national ceramics museum at Sevres, which may now be left - even in the interim arrangements - without expert Keepers. To compound anxiety about the Museum's future, as a result of the separation of the Museum into two main divisions headed by an Assistant Director (Collections) - yet to be appointed - and the Assistant Director (Administration) - a post into which the former Chief Administrator has already been moved - the display of objects and the education of the public will be the ultimate responsibility of the Administrator rather than the head of Collections, and will come under the 'Head of Marketing and Presentation'.

The use of this terminology alone demonstrates the degree to which the Director and Trustees have lost their way by pursuing management goals rather than the true aims and purposes of the Museum. This is equally evident in the reasons put forward for introducing the re-organisation. Although the main motives are clearly financial - it is predicted that the salaries bill will cause expenditure to exceed income by 1991-92 - also cited are 'defects in the management of the collections', as perceived by the National Audit Office report and the Public Accounts Committee's response to it (see the May 1988 editorial), as well as 'changing social and educational trends which show a higher public expectation of museums'.

The National Audit Office report was a grossly misleading document containing a quantity of inaccurate and alarmist statistics. (To take only one example, 1980 figures were cited for the backlog in conservation of miniatures, which had almost entirely been cleared by 1988). Instead of pointing out its errors, the Director and Trustees have seized on the report as a way of pushing through the new structure - a most regrettable sacrifice of truth to politics, and one that can only rebound on the administration. This is in notable contrast to the Museum's reaction to the Rayner scrutiny of 1982, on which the Director and Keepers produced a point by point commentary which included a valuable definition of the Museum's aims.

All National Museums face a crisis of funding caused by the failure of the Government to take account of nationally agreed pay awards in their annual grant-in-aid. If83% of the V & A's annual grant is absorbed by the salaries bill, the figure at the British Museum is closer to 90%. If the V & A is due to go into deficit in 1992, its Trustees should be campaigning for realistic funding, not planning to dis- mantle a structure that has ensured the Museum's place as the pre-eminent decorative arts collection in the world, and that has trained up Keepers with unrivalled expertise, whose publications are universally esteemed. Their exact scholarship, acquired by daily familiarity with their collections, is the only proper basis for the wider education of the museum's public.

The Trustees of the V & A have already in the past year presided over a series of wrong decisions - the ill- judged advertising campaign denigrating the Museum's collections and the auction preview held in the galleries. Their readiness now to pass with such haste a plan so sketchy and yet so damaging raises serious doubts about their worthiness to hold these great collections in trust.