Our Changing World

“Let’s give up our jobs! Let’s travel to somewhere in the world where music, dance and drama are closely linked. Let’s stay as long as we can afford, learn as much as we can, buy as many authentic resources as we can and then teach everything we’ve learnt in workshops in the UK.”

That is what my wife, Jacqui, said when she came home from work one day in the summer of 2002. Jacqui was then the Head of Drama in a school in Surrey and I was mainly forging an income from peripatetic drum kit/percussion teaching and leading a few African drumming workshops. We settled on traveling to Bali in Indonesia and were able to stay there for a year, living with a local family. We fell on our feet with my gamelan teacher being a prince in the royal family, Jacqui’s dance teacher being one of the most respected on the island and having shadow puppetry lessons with a leading shadow puppeteer. We commissioned our own 30­‐player set of gamelan instruments to be built and ended up needing to book a 40ft shipping container to bring everything back to the UK!

It was all such a great idea, but would it work? Would schools book us to do workshops? Thankfully, our Indonesian arts workshops were an instant hit and we were very fortunate that whole­‐class instrumental learning was very much in its infancy so what we were doing was very new and suited the educational landscape at the time. We quickly expanded into other world‐music genres, and in 2014 we partnered with the charity Street Child United to deliver two projects that led to us achieving the Guinness World Records for the largest samba band and the largest drumming lesson! These two projects remain the only world‐music projects nominated as finalists in the history of the Music Teacher Awards.

We could sit back and reminisce in our achievements. We are very proud and very grateful for what we have been able to achieve over the past 15 years. However, there are a couple of questions we’ve been asking ourselves a lot in recent years.

‘Is what we’re doing still relevant, needed and appropriate for music education today? How has the educational landscape changed since we started in 2002 and how would schools most benefit from our world‐music expertise?’

When we started, Wider Opportunities didn’t exist – the concept of teaching practical curriculum music lessons with every pupil having an instrument to play was alien to most primary schools. As a result, most primary school music coordinators we encountered at the time felt inexperienced at leading a whole‐class percussion project.

Over the past 15 years we’ve seen primary school class teachers gradually gaining confidence in leading whole‐class percussion lessons. We particularly noticed this during our 2016 Bang the Drum project which involved a hybrid workshop & video tuition scheme of work and required the class teacher to lead some whole‐class drumming in the lessons. During observations in several different schools participating in this project, we were impressed that, using the teaching resources and drums we had provided, the class teachers, most of whom were not music specialists, felt confident to lead such a lesson from a drum ‐ and were doing it very well!

Alongside our workshops with children have always been our CPD programmes. In recent years we’ve found the numbers of primary school class teachers attending our CPD programmes has increased greatly. The feedback we frequently hear is that class teachers and primary music coordinators are generally now comfortable with leading whole‐class music activities themselves but the issue is that they are often lacking good teaching resources and schemes of work. Another issue we have always had is that being based in the south‐east of England, apart from our CPD programmes, we have worked almost exclusively in schools in the south‐east. Our school visits workshop model doesn’t work to extend to other parts of the UK and beyond due to increased travel costs.

Recently, we were fortunate to gain Action Research funding from A New Direction (the Arts Council England Bridge organisation for London) to pilot some new ways of working which has resulting in us recently launching our online workshops and online 1‐term courses. These are video based and can be accessed wherever you are, whenever you want. The Arts Award can be included in the 1‐term courses and class assessments are easily carried out by the class teachers whilst the pupils are playing along to the videos and answering the online quizzes. Our experienced world‐music facilitators are expert mentors for each school, providing support where needed.

As we continue to be very reflective and adaptive in our work, we are hoping that our 15 years experience of leading whole‐class world‐music projects will continue to support the teaching and learning within the classroom for many years to come.

@inspireworksuk @PrimaryMusicMag