Music in and out of schools

Sheila Allen explores how bringing community music and mainstream education closer together can transform livess

Education is always in the news. In the last couple of years, strikes, funding shortfalls, the recruitment and retention of appropriately qualified teachers, the propriety of Ofsted and, now a new government and another new Education Secretary, are, to name but a few, issues which are at the forefront of the British education system in 2024. Over a similar period we were constantly reminded of the importance of an engaging and robust music education by seeing poignant national events that demonstrated a small portion of what Britain's finest performers can do to enhance state celebrations. Many of those taking part learned to play their instruments as children, with their first steps being taken at school or in a community band or community orchestra.

The following story is an example of what it can be like, for a child and their family, negotiating their way through a musical education.

Olivia started school at the age of four in 2008 in Lancashire. A bright, happy but quiet child, she enjoyed school and enjoyed taking part in things, albeit on the periphery, content for others to be in the limelight.

At the age of eight, in Year 4, she was introduced to the Wider Opportunities Scheme. This wellestablished and now commonplace initiative was prompted by David Blunkett’s (Secretary of State for Education) pledge in 2001 that “over time, every primary school child that wants to, should have the opportunity of learning a musical instrument”. ‘Wider Opps’ has developed its scope over the years, but its overall success does rely on school staff being invested in it too, which is sometimes not the case.

Through this scheme, Olivia was introduced to the cornet - a member of the brass family - small enough for little hands, not too heavy and perfectly matched to a Year 4 physique.

She loved it. At the age of eight, Olivia found her ‘happy place’ as we like to call it. But after 19 weeks, the “Wider Opportunity” came to an abrupt end. She and her friend appeared to be the only children in the year group who wanted to continue and there was no apparent progression in curricular music and no succession in curricular teaching. Indeed, it appeared that the school relied solely on whole class tuition and the school choir to tick the box that was music provision.

Olivia took up the offer of county-provided lunchtime lessons and was given an instrument. Two years on, as she approached the end of year six, it was obvious that Olivia had made lots of progress. Her secondary school, however, didn’t offer brass lessons so the instrument had to be given back. Mum started researching how this obvious gap in her child’s musical education could be plugged. She googled ‘brass bands’ and found The Balderstone Brass Band. It was the most local choice that had a training programme giving Olivia and her younger brother the opportunity, for the first time, to play in a band. In addition, there was a local fundraising initiative where a peripatetic teacher offered to teach the siblings for an hour in exchange for a £10 donation to their church. This was a game changer and where the musical route through school took an oblique turn, diverting but progressing Olivia and her brother’s playing through to Grade 6. Brass bands, and a series of flukes meant that eventually, both Olivia and her brother became members of the Lancashire Youth Brass Band and the National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain.

But, to be able to make something of herself in the musical world, Olivia needed qualifications. A Key Stage 3 ‘carousel’ system (now strongly discouraged by Ofsted) predictably diluted the uptake to GCSE at her secondary school, immediately turning GCSE Music into a twilight class of three students. Like so many students, the pandemic provided Olivia with a music GCSE grade that reflected the results of the previous year’s cohort, not a reflection of her own output. For the ensemble component of the GCSE performance paper, the Lancashire Youth Brass Band provided the ensemble and a band member (who played piano) accompanied her solo performance. Other than at Christmas, this was the first time that Olivia had performed in that school. She achieved a high enough grade overall to go on to take A level.

A levels were comparatively uneventful but for the final hurdle - that of getting onto a university course. A series of administrative blunders involving a withdrawn course meant she wasn’t able to access a course that suited her skillset. The Lancashire Youth Brass Band’s leaders rallied to the call and managed to secure Olivia a late audition at an alternative institution, but with only a day’s notice to complete an application and a week’s notice to learn a whole concerto for a practical audition.

Now in her second year on a course at the Royal Northern College of Music, Olivia is working hard at what she loves, including leading a training band herself, giving back to the ‘system’ that has given her so much. And she hasn’t achieved this through our education system as one might expect; she has achieved it all despite it.

Let’s just take a moment to explore Olivia’s tale of triumph over adversity. Community musical organisations - brass bands in this case - made up for a lack of musical activity and development in her schools. The quality of these opportunities must not be underestimated, but they do, inevitably, have their limits. Community bands cannot provide GCSEs or A Levels - that is a given. But, this lifeline into the community is not necessarily borne from an existing network of affiliate partnerships as could be the case. Schools are often unaware of the community organisations that surround them as teaching and support staff don't live locally. Regrettably, there is also still a reluctance from some hubs to ‘share’ their young musicians with community bands for fear of losing valuable fees - understandable - but as a sector still in crisis, surely we can no longer accommodate this outdated and restrictive approach to musical outcomes for young people. Rather, we should be uniting our efforts to work together to benefit from this often untapped resource. The Warwickshire and Coventry Youth Brass Course is a fine example of how collaboration can work in this area as The Heart of England hub, Brass Bands England and volunteers from local brass bands have proven.

Carousels in Key Stage 3 and twilight sessions for GCSE classes have marginalised creative students into the fringes of mainstream schools, forcing those who have access (geographical, financial or those with relevant contacts) out of the school responsibility. It highlights how little that those with creative talents are valued in education. Whilst hubs can capture the practical side of musicmaking, this can come at a monetary cost that can be prohibitive to many.

Let’s take a look at the Key Stage 2 experience. One would hope that in the last eight or nine years, since Olivia left her primary school, that music provision has had to improve. The Model Music Curriculum, the Ofsted Music Subject Research Review (2021), followed, in 2022 by the National Plan for Music Education briefly threw music, as a foundation subject, into the frontline of curricular development. On paper, this was great news. The NPME2 clearly spells out what a music department in a state primary or secondary school should look like but it also makes it crystal clear that community music should be a valued part of this music education ecosystem too.

A few phone calls to Initial Teacher Training providers recently produced some very guarded responses when asked about the amount of music subject coaching on their PGCE courses. There’s clearly an issue in equipping our Early Career Teachers with enough subject knowledge to survive the rigours of a teaching career. In teacher forums across social media, the fear is tangible among new teachers who are asked to lead a subject in which they may have had less than a day’s ‘official’ training for (specific Research in 2019 by the Birmingham City University Music Education Research Group Music Teaching Provision in Primary Schools shared some truly unsettling data on this subject).

It is overwhelmingly clear that teaching our teachers to teach music is where the repair needs to begin. But until we can instigate a wholesale shift away from our current and damaging hierarchy of subjects this isn’t going to happen any time soon. Community musicians, however, can be involved in the process by sharing their musical experience in schools. The NPME2 still wants this to happen, in fact, as a reminder, primary school music leads were advised thus:

Primary music leads should think about opportunities to invite performances from local secondary pupils or local ensembles (Hub ensembles or broader community groups), to help build links and provide role models for younger pupils. Teachers will want to consider how such opportunities can be linked into their curriculum delivery, so that they build on the pupils’ learning, and how they can reflect and build on pupils’ own musical interests and passions.

Brass Bands England (BBE) has an effective initiative running currently which supports the spirit of the NPME2. Proms in the Playground encourages its member brass bands (and others) to offer their musical services to their local schools, to make themselves known to them by offering to play a free, short concert in their playground during the first three weeks of July. This is proving popular among schools, some of which are actively seeking out their local brass bands to take part, and among the bands themselves, which see an opportunity to engage with the prospective future of their own organisations. This relationshipbuilding musical activity improves children’s experiences of music in the short-term, but also creates valuable connections in the long-term.

So, where does all this leave children and young people like Olivia in the here and now? While brass bands and similar organisations continue to supply solutions, this stark landscape leaves too many of our young people starved of a musical future and it will take far beyond their school career to make good.

In the meantime, we have the NPME2 - an already 2 year old document, full of ideals to strive for, but even more promising and immediately available is our very rich and capable national network of community music-makers.

This network can be tapped into readily and effectively and used to influence musical engagement and progression in education. It only takes a small amount of effort and it doesn’t eat into precarious school budgets. Organisations like Brass Bands England, through its Brass Foundations programme (funded by Arts Council England), are making real progress in this area, making those introductions, working and partnering with music hubs, schools and community brass bands, connecting them for the benefit of our children’s musical futures. It’s an easy dialogue to have and its rewards actually do have the power to transform lives - not when all the systemic issues are finally fixed, but right now.