Jonathan Savage

Today marks the end of my work for this year. At around 4pm today, the phone gets switched off, emails will go unanswered and work towards publishing deadlines put on hold until the 3rd January. Thanks for your contributions to the blog over the year. I hope you have found it a useful and informative resource. I’ve enjoyed using it as a platform to explore ideas. I’ll look forward to more blogging in 2012 but, until then, can I take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

I’m in the process of re-reading the report published yesterday about the future shape of the National Curriculum for England. The debate on Twitter has thrown up some good points, some of which, although basic, are worthy reiterating here.

Firstly, the Government has announced that there will a one year delay in implementing these changes. Those of us in the music education community are used to Government delays and extended deadlines! So, a new National Curriculum will not be in place until September 2014 (at the earliest). I’m not sure I really buy the reasons given for this by the DfE (more debate, taking time to get it right, etc). It smacks of incompetence to me, and a recognition that making all your curriculum experts redundant last year really wasn’t the best move.

Secondly, when the new National Curriculum is launched it really won’t be a ‘national’ curriculum in any meaningful sense. By then, if the current trends continue, the vast majority of secondary schools and many primary schools will have opted out by becoming academies and will not be obliged to follow the ‘national’ curriculum at all. The accountability structures for academies are already causing many people a great deal of concern; this will only continue and concerns will deepen I suspect as some of the legal frameworks and apparent  financial benefits (they’re not looking so attractive now are they?) underpinning academies begin to unravel.

Thirdly, in all the exuberance about the report it is worth remembering that it is just a report from a group of experienced, well informed and intelligent education experts. On that basis, it seems highly likely that Gove will ignore the whole thing. Only kidding! But whilst the report might, on the whole, be encouraging in many respects, there is still campaigning and advocacy work to be done. This report is not Government policy and there are no guarantees that the Government will adopt each recommendation here. So, for music education, let’s not starting counting any eggs before they are hatched.

Finally, an apology. I was a bit hasty with the negative prose about our music education organisations yesterday. One organisation, the Incorporated Society of Musicians, has done sterling work over the last year. Their Public Affairs and Policy Officer – Henry Vann – deserves particular praise for his tireless advocacy and campaigning on behalf of the music education community. Thanks Henry and apologies for overlooking the excellent work you have done. You are a valued colleague and I really appreciate your sustained and powerful advocacy. I know much of this takes place behind the scenes but it is important to recognise, publicly, your contribution which does, I know, go well beyond the legitimate demands made of you by your employer.

The report by the expert review panel for the National Curriculum review has published its framework for the new National Curriculum today. You can download their report here. For Music, there is good news of a sort! The recommendation is that it will be a foundation subject in the National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 – 3 (that will be Years 1 – 8 in the new system) alongside Art and Design. Geography, History and PE will be foundation subjects across Key Stages 1 – 4; MFL for Key Stages 2 – 4.

The report recommends changes to the Key Stage structure (see Chapter 5). The new structure, if adopted, will be Key Stage 1 (Years 1 & 2), Lower Key Stage 2 (Years 3 & 4), Upper Key Stage 2 (Years 5 & 6), Key Stage 3 (Years 7 & and Key Stage 4 (Years 9 – 11). NOTE the change to a two year Key Stage 3 that will impact on the provision of Music compared to the current system.

What does that mean? It means that Music will be a statutory requirement. It will have a Programme of Study, but that will be ‘refined and condensed with minimal or no Attainment Target’ (see p.25 of the Report). You may think this is good news. I’m not so sure. It rather depends what ‘refined and condensed’ means.

Furthermore, the Report makes a further proposal that is relevant here. ‘The Arts’, the authors suggest, should be made compulsory at Key Stage 4 as part of a ‘Basic Curriculum’ (as opposed to those Core and Foundation subjects that make up the National Curriculum). In other words, as Paragraph 4.24 puts it:

We therefore recommend that education in art and music should be supported in Key Stage 4 through statutory requirement (separately or in combination), i.e. as part of the Basic Curriculum, as broad responsibilities; content should be determined by the school.

The following table (from p.29 of the Report) presents a summary of the proposals:

My initial impression of the report is that it is an work-man-like document. Care and attention to detail has been paid to a vast number of issues. I’ll pick up on more of these after Christmas. I’m sure the media will pick up on some of the slightly more lunatic elements (!), but for music education there is broadly speaking good news here. I’d like to think this is, in part, down to the significant amount of campaigning that has gone one by various people  across the country. The same can’t be said of the vast majority of our national music organisations who have been next to useless in my opinion. No doubt they will welcome these changes. But they need to have a serious look at themselves and what or whose purposes they serve.

For completeness, here are the links to the other documents that support the Report as released by the DfE today:

Review of the National Curriculum in England: Report on subject breadth in international jurisdictions

Review of the National Curriculum in England: Summary report of the call for evidence

A copy of the statement made by Michael Gove to the HoC today (19/12/11)

There was an interesting article in The Telegraph on Friday. Within it (buried beneath the most boring headline) were a couple of paragraphs that indicate that the National Curriculum review, and subsequent implementation timescale, will be delayed by one year. Here is the relevant part:

The conclusions of the review had been expected in the new year, but wholesale reform of the curriculum will now be delayed by 12 months. A final report by an expert panel is unlikely to be published until the end of 2012, with specifications in the core subjects to be introduced in 2014 rather than 2013.

The development is likely to prompt claims of disarray within the Department for Education. However, a Coalition source said the pause was necessary to create a “gold standard” curriculum that pushed children harder.

In my view, whilst the DfE might think they are creating a ‘gold standard’, I think they are understaffed and under-resourced and that this is entirely a problem of Gove’s own making. Do you remember the QCDA, the organisation that Gove scrapped weeks after coming to office that had responsibility for all matters to do with curricula and examinations? Whilst it came in for a lot of unwarranted flak, their expertise is sorely lacking from recent developments in our education system. I wonder whether Gove thinks it was still a good idea to get rid of such a considerable repository of knowledge and experience? (Acutally, I haven’t wondered for very long; I’m sure he thinks it was a good idea).

But this won’t stop Gove from centralising. The TDA is next, being subsumed with the DfE as the newly branded ‘Teaching Agency’. Our system for training teachers is already under considerable strain and policies have also been developed here which stagger belief. Watch out for further chaos and mayhem as Gove continues his ideological, ill-considered rampage through our education system.

Figures released today to ITE providers reveal more cuts to the training of music teachers in our universities. Click here for the TDA allocations subject by subject, here for the ‘methodology’ behind the cuts, and here for the allocation letter.

For us at MMU, our course will be cut from 31 students this year to 24 students next year. This is a cut of 25% for a OFSTED rated ‘outstanding’ PGCE course. This follows a cut for 40% from 58 in 2009/10. The vast majority of other music providers are being cut by a similar amount.

But there is sting in the tale here for all providers whose numbers for a specific course are 10 students or below.  They will not be able to run these courses any more. Here is an extract from the TDA letter:

The reduction in secondary places and the DFE’s strategy to increase school led provision may result in some providers having to consider their involvement in initial teacher training. In particular there are a number of cohorts that have been identified as potentially unviable due to their small size. These cohorts are clearly identified in Annex 2 (total allocations of 10 places or less in HEI providers). We anticipate a need for providers to rebalance their provision for these places. We will work with providers to negotiate movements of places so long as the total number of allocations is not increased and that the movements maintain or improve quality.

It is expected that allocations will continue to be limited for traditional mainstream HEI led programmes. For AY2013/14 we will only allocate places in small cohorts if they are being delivered through a school led programme. We will work with providers over the coming months on determining those places which are school led. This will form the basis of a re-engineering of the allocations but we are informing providers now that there is no guarantee that they will be allocated any places in the identified small cohorts for AY2013/14 onwards. This is a significant change to the sector and we will work with providers to manage the transition. However, our initial focus will be on the quality and viability of cohorts in AY2012/13. To that end we would ask providers who are unable to deliver the allocations as they are set out in Annex 2 to contact the TDA at the earliest point through their regional lead.

So, for this year only providers will exchange places (you give me your music places, and I’ll give you my art places) to make ‘viable’ course numbers of 11 or more. Next year (2013/14), these allocations will not be made at all to university-led courses.

This is a disaster for the music education community that has been built around these universities. It spells the end of these communities for the vast majority of universities that have offered these courses over the last twenty years or so. Given the announced allocations in this table, it would spell the end for PGCE music courses at the following institutions:

• Bath Spa
• Edge Hill
• Goldsmiths
• Liverpool Hope
• Nottingham Trent
• Oxford Brookes
• University of Bristol
• University of Cambridge
• University of Cumbria
• University of Durham
• University of East London
• University of Greenwich
• University of Hudderfield
• University of Plymouth
• University of Reading

However, SCITT training places (despite being smaller than many of these providers) are protected. Strange world isn’t it?

In reality, some of these courses will remain open by subsuming numbers from the closure of a ‘rival’ institutions courses. Get ready for some terrible decisions.

I’ll post more tomorrow when I’ve calmed down a bit.

Recent figures released in a letter from Michael Gove to Stephen Hillier (Chief Executive at the TDA) reveal that only 340 music teachers will be trained in all ITT routes (except Teach First) next year. This is a reduction of c.13% from the 390 trained this year.

Precise allocations to individual teacher training providers will be announced this month (still waiting …) but this reduction of 13% is very disappointing given the 44% reduction last year. It’s hard to believe that in 2009/10 we trained 690 music teachers; next year we will train just 340 (over a 50% cut).

What are the reasons for this cut? Gove’s letter highlights changing demographics and the impact of changes due to Government policy. These cuts confirm, to me at least, that the idea of a postgraduate level qualified teacher of Music will become the exception not the norm in many of schools during the next 3 – 5 years.

And by the way, this 13% cut is against a general 5% reduction in secondary  teacher training places for next year. What’s your explanation for these cuts?

I’m often asked ‘what is it like to work in a university today’? Generally, it is a very enjoyable experience. I’m fortunate to have excellent colleagues and, year by year, groups of fantastic students to work with. However, more widely, I am very concerned about the future for our universities. When asked why, normally I fumble around for a list of reasons concerning the hasty implementation of Government policies and VCs being caught between a rock and a hard place.

Given what I’ve always thought was my less than convincing answer, I was pleased to read a much more eloquent response to this question by Keith Thomas, in an essay for the London Review of Books. Given current policies and trends, he believes we should be deeply concerned about the future of our universities for many reasons, including:

• the discontinuance of free university education;
• the withdrawal of direct public funding for the teaching of the humanities and the social sciences;
• the subjection of universities to an intrusive regime of government regulation and inquisitorial audit;
• the crude attempt to measure and increase scholarly ‘output’;
• the requirement that all academic research have an ‘impact’ on the economy;
• the transformation of self-governing communities of scholars into mega-businesses, staffed by a highly-paid executive class, who oversee the professors, or middle managers, who in turn rule over an ill-paid and often temporary or part-time proletariat of junior lecturers and research assistants, coping with an ever-worsening staff-student ratio;
• the notion that universities, rather than collaborating in their common task, should compete with each other, and with private providers, to sell their services in a market, where students are seen, not as partners in a joint enterprise of learning and understanding, but as ‘consumers’, seeking the cheapest deals which will enable them to emerge with the highest earning prospects;
• the indiscriminate application of the label ‘university’ to institutions whose primary task is to provide vocational training and whose staff do not carry out research;
• and the rejection of the idea that higher education might have a non-monetary value, or that science, scholarship and intellectual inquiry are important for reasons unconnected with economic growth.

I couldn’t have put it better myself! And in respect to the role that VCs play, he has strong words too (at this point I thought of the UEA’s VC and his callous decision to close the School of Music). But there will be many, many others who fit the bill described by Thomas:

Confronted by philistinism on the scale of the Browne Report and the government’s White Paper, what are we to do? Where can we turn? [...] Not to the vice-chancellors, for, with some honourable exceptions, they have been remarkably supine in the face of increasingly maladroit government policies, and are understandably more concerned to see what their own institutions can gain from the new arrangements than to challenge them directly.

Supine? That’s one word for it. I can think of many others. ‘Understandably’? I’d encourage you to read Thomas’ whole essay to see how far our universities have moved from their historical routes in recent years.

There was some potentially good news for music education over the weekend. Michael Gove’s interview with Tom Service on Radio 3′s Music Matters programme started with a discussion about Music and its inclusion/exclusion from the next generation of our National Curriculum. It’s available for the next 5 days and I’d encourage you to listen to it for yourself.

As we all know, no politician is going to pre-empt the outcomes of a Review process such as that being undertaken by the National Curriculum Review. However, Gove did have this to say in answer to Tom’s opening question as to whether Music would be in or out of the next National Curriculum:

I can’t pre-empt the outcome of the NC review. I certainly can’t say that this subject is going to be preserved within the NC without the rest of the entire tapestry being all in place. But, I think anyone looking at the care and education that has gone into the NPME, following on from Darren Henley’s fantastic work, would presume from that, that it would be eccentric of the Department for Education not to have Music enjoying a prominent place in the NC. I can’t go further that that. That’s as big a hint as I feel I can drop at this stage.

[Service: So the converse interpretation, which is Music has got ring-fenced money, this plan will do, therefore we can take it off the curriculum without worrying about it too much. We shouldn't be taking that away from the NPME?]

No, absolutely not.

On the face of this, this is good news. It annoys me that we are having to accept ‘hints’ about serious issues like this but, that aside, the plain reading seems to be that Gove is in favour of Music as a prominent subject within the National Curriculum. (Of course, you can only accept this premise if you buy that idea that Gove’s DfE is not ‘eccentric’ or won’t act in an eccentric way in the future!).

So, if you have campaigned hard for Music’s inclusion within the National Curriculum it appears that this campaigning has not been unproductive. However, perhaps the situation is still not as clear as we would like? As I wrote about nearly a year ago,  just because a subject is ‘in’ the National Curriculum does not mean that it will have a fully written programme of study of the type that we have become familiar over recent years. It may not have any prescribed content or assessment process but merely be left for schools to decide, ‘at a local level’, why, how and when it is taught. This would be a recipe for disaster.

Gove has left himself a considerable amount of wriggle room. Maybe it seems more likely today that Music will be included in the next National Curriculum given his hint (great!), but what that means and how it is interpreted by those in power, i.e. headteachers, is another matter entirely. As Marc Jaffrey and I have been saying for sometime now, headteachers are the people who, ultimately, will decide the shape and provision of music education within their schools. Given what is happening in our schools and music services right now, I’m not too optimistic about their judgements relating to the delivery of a broad and balanced music education for all pupils.

Ultimately, Gove and the DfE have a lot to answer for in creating a prolonged period of uncertainty and ambiguity. Across the country, talented music educators (school teachers, instrumental teachers and others) are already loosing their jobs as headteachers and local authorities restructure their provision in this area. Private providers are already offering cheap musical ‘solutions’ to schools with unqualified staff and no commitment to pupils’ long term musical development (let alone their teachers’ CPD). Around south Cheshire where I live, I hear of numerous private instrumental teachers being priced out of the market by these companies that undercut their prices (often by only paying their ‘teachers’ just above the minimum wage), with headteachers being only too happy to employ their staff without having to worry about pension payments, sick pay or holiday pay.

With all the fuss around the creation of the new music ‘hubs’, has anyone asked what proportion of those doing the teaching in these hubs will be qualified teachers (i.e. in the normal sense of the work ‘qualified’ – at PG (Cert) level; not the Henley QME level)? And what do you think the average level of pay will be for these ‘teachers’? Will they get funded pensions, holiday and sick pay like normal teachers? Or will they be like the Warwickshire instrumental teachers I met recently? They’ve all been sacked this month from their LA music service and told to re-apply for positions as freelance instrumental tutors. I suspect that this will be the future for many working in this sector. In all the celebrations surrounding the NPME, just remember what we are in the process of loosing.

Here’s Bill’s response to my question about the future of school-based music education in the United Kingdom. Bill is Yamaha UK’s Music Education Manager. Thanks for finding the time to contribute to my blog Bill.

Yesterday I joined the Music Education Council’s seminar on the National Plan for Music Education (NPfME), which was published a week ago. The Plan sets out government’s guidelines for a music education whose governmental funding contribution remains ring-fenced (uniquely among other subjects) albeit with reducing funding. (This does not affect and is different from the funding that schools continue to receive for delivering each curriculum subject within school.)

Despite all the obvious negatives around change in general and budget cuts in particular, it seems to me that the Plan does provide opportunities for a radical re-think – structurally, at least – and to move music education forward with new music education hubs attracting a posse of local providers who will collectively contribute in a broader way than before to young people’s music education. Read the rest of this entry »