Jonathan Savage

What’s in store for education over the next fifteen to twenty years? We were asked to consider this question – albeit put across in a more eloquent way – during our Division day at the Institute of Education yesterday.

As usual, it made me wonder about the nature of individual subjects, curriculum development and various recent political announcements. It prompted me to write the following which I shared on our Division wiki and repeat here for any of you out there who may be interested.
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If you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, I would strongly recommend that you have a look at this week’s front page in the TES. You can view it here. I won’t comment extensively on this today, but I don’t think this article is too far off the mark. There is a rough time ahead for ‘small’ subjects in the school curriculum. For many, the UK leads the world in music education. This may not be the case for much longer. Be prepared for a fight.

Back to the world of music education for a post (at last – I hear some of you say), it was great to read Tom’s article on The Guardian blog today. I have no particular strong views about the work of El Sistema and related projects in the United Kingdom. But what really annoys me is when people who ought to know better (in this case Richard Holloway) make overly positive comments about their own work whilst misrepresenting the quality of music education everywhere else. This misrepresentation of so much good quality music education around the United Kingdom within our schools and music services on this Radio 4 programme was shocking. It leads me to agree with Tom that whilst Richard Holloway is a powerful advocate of El Sistema …

… he could be even more effective in his advocacy of music education in general if he understood the work that has been happening in Scotland and the rest of Britain for decades – so much of it unheralded, unpromoted, unpublicised – and if he put his weight behind promoting the whole sector, not just one tiny part of it.

I really enjoyed reading this article about the music teachers behind some of the famous names in contemporary music today (Arctic Monkeys, Muse, XX, Leona Lewis, etc). There are some brilliant stories here about how they coached, encouraged and developed their musical talents often in less than ideal circumstances. Hats off to the Guardian for putting this story together. It should serve as inspiration for the large number of hard-working music teachers across schools, and the great work they do in providing a regular, systematic, developmental and high quality music education for their pupils.

It was good to notified about the release of a quality online publication by the Zone Music Education team. You can find there excellent publication here (and it’s free). Lots of interesting articles include reviews of two products by Notion – a company with a promising future in UK music education.

There’s a helpful article by Keith Evans on the Music-ITE site that I enjoyed reading today. It explores the what Evans thinks is the potential decline in reflective thinking and practice amongst some forms of initial teacher education in music. His conclusions assert:

The rapid growth of employment-based routes into teaching in recent years reflects the dominance of the competent craftsperson model and, while it would be unfair to suggest that the idea of reflective practitioner is ignored, it perhaps does not get quite the same emphasis it does on a PGCE programme. Obviously, there are specific QTS standards concerned with reflection underpinning all routes into teaching, but PGCE written assignments are still frequently framed as tasks of critical reflection. Another strength of the PGCE model is the opportunity it offers student teachers to regroup at the university at regular intervals throughout the course, reflect on experiences and gradually build a personal philosophy for music education.

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It was good to see this report covered on the BBC website late last week. To my knowledge, the FMS has commissioned the first piece of evaluative work into the Wider Opportunities programme. It is an interesting study and well worth a read (although I can’t find the full report on the FMS website yet).

In some senses, there are no surprises here at all. The report endorses the Wider Opportunities approach to instrumental learning, even hinting that whole class tuition is as effective as small group tuition. On second thoughts, perhaps I should have been surprised by that if I reflect back over the longer term of instrumental teaching in schools?

Obviously, I’m a firm advocate for the benefits of a music education for all children. But I do worry that pieces of research/evaluation like this sometimes over-step the mark. I’m really not sure that claims about pupils’ self-esteem being raised through participating in Wider Opportunities, and the benefits that this has on their wider studies, can be validated in what seems like a short-scale evaluative study. Surely a longitudinal study of some sort is needed for that? But, the research seems to have been funded by the FMS, Yamaha and other musical groups so perhaps its findings are not that suprising. The key recommendations made be laugh out loud. What do you make of this selection:

1.2 Planning and programming of WO should be more open to input and decision making from children; Why?

2.5 Continued financial and resource commitment to schools and music services is needed to meet the rapid growth in demand for WO music provisions; No surprise there! Nothing like having a bit of research to back up your claim for more money from an ever-decreasing pot.

3.4 Strategic targeting towards broader improvement in initial teacher education for class teachers; Easy to have a pop at classroom teachers. We’ve seen that before fairly recently.

3.5 Encouraging greater parity of training and pay and conditions across music services; In other words, lets pay unqualified instructors the same as qualified teachers. After all, what’s the difference?

Bit cynical? Maybe. What do others think?

You’ve got four weeks to comment on the ‘new’ subject level descriptors and attainment target. You can find all the necessary information here. Whilst not wanting to pre-judge anyone’s comments, I found it very hard to find anything but minor changes in the new level descriptions as compared to those that accompany the latest revision of the new National Curriculum in 2007  (which didn’t change them in any meaningful way from the previous version in 2000). Given all incessant debate about these levels and how they should be used or not used, it seems that we have missed a real opportunity here to change something that is the bane of many teachers’ lives. It is disappointing to say the least.

On a related matter, there is an interesting reference in the letter from the QCDA to Ed Balls about APP:

It seems that there is a move to shy away from dictating to schools the precise approach that they should conducting teacher asessment at Key Stage 3. It is all ‘as you are then’ to my mind. My response: what a wasted opportunity.

Here is some information about a conference on music, identity and social interaction to be held at the RNCM next year. Highly recommended.

Reading through the Transforming Transitions document (available within the briefing paper from the Music Manifesto website (http://tinyurl.com/ycuo98o) was at times an exciting, and and other dispiriting, experience. This initiative will build on the work of Musical Futures and is also funded by at grant of over £0.5m from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. In the words of the briefing paper:

This new initiative is intended to achieve a step change in the co-ordination, continuity and progression of young people’s music learning as they transfer from primary to secondary school, tackling the widely acknowledged lack of consistent and effective mechanisms to support young people at this difficult point of transition.[my emphasis]

Who could disagree that this is a potentially worthy venture? It picks up on some of the language from the Government’s New Opportunities initiative (http://tinyurl.com/y9y4mep) and translates this into a context which many music educators are familiar with (i.e the potential gap between Key Stages 2 and 3). It is only when one looks a bit more closely at some of the language within the briefing paper itself that some of the age-old Musical Futures-type prejudices begin to emerge. I’ve only got time to consider one example, but there are several others that could have been mentioned:

Many of the issues are not particular to music but there is a strong case for focusing on music learning given the significant government support (‘Sing-Up’, ‘Wider Opportunities’, ‘The Instrument Fund’, etc.) for music in school that has gone to the primary sector in recent years and that has raised young people’s motivation and desire to be musically active – and the clear risk that these gains will be lost in the intervening years before they might benefit from participation with MusicalFutures approaches towards the end of KS3.[my emphasis]

I’m not sure who composed this final sentence, but it is a damming inditement of the cavalier attitudes of this kind of initiative and, unfortunately, not untypical of the language of this organisation. Read the rest of this entry »