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Music education

Facing the music

The Government has ambitious plans for music education yet is cutting funding for music services, teacher training and even instruments. Elyssa Campbell-Barr investigates.

Launching the National Plan for Music Education last November, Education Secretary Michael Gove said it would “deliver a music education system that encourages everyone, whatever their background, to enjoy music and help those with real talent to flourish as brilliant musicians”.

So how will the Government support this? By drastically reducing funding, from £77.5m this year to £58m in 2014/15. That’s a cut of 20 per cent in three years (without taking inflation into account), on top of a 10 per cent cut in real terms last year.

There will also be fewer specialist teachers, with funded places on PGCE music courses down by 43 per cent, and fewer instruments, as the £10m instrument fund has been axed.

Music education services were among the first casualties of the decision to slash local authority (LA) budgets. Within months of the coalition coming to power, over a third of LAs had issued redundancy notices to music teachers.

An ensemble piece

The NUT has been challenging cuts and redundancies, with significant successes. In Brighton and Hove, for example, the Union was part of an alliance which successfully lobbied the LA to reconsider scrapping its subsidy for the music service (on top of a 33 per cent cut in its central government grant).

The Council has now pledged to fund the service at its current level to 2013, with a cut of only 25 per cent the following year.

The NUT has joined forces with the Musicians’ Union (MU). “We are working with the NUT in supporting members… and also lobbying authorities to think again when deciding budgets,” explains Diane Widdison, MU National Organiser for Education. “We’ve had successes in reversing cuts for some music services and achieving a reprieve for others.”

The NUT and MU are pressuring the Government, as it carries out its curriculum review, to ensure music remains on the national curriculum. Michael Gove has excluded music from the English Baccalaureate, leading secondary schools to cut the time and resources allocated to music in favour of EBac subjects.

Chorus of disapproval

“Music must continue to be part of the national curriculum,” says NUT General Secretary Christine Blower. “The stark divisions between the educational opportunities of children from different economic backgrounds are widening as a result of the cuts.”

These divisions were evident in Ofsted’s report Music in Schools: Wider Still and Wider, published in March this year. It found that pupils with special needs, on free school meals or in the care system are significantly less likely to be involved in extra-curricular music activities, especially at secondary level.

Finale

From September 2012 new ‘music hubs’ will deliver music services locally. Already experts have expressed concern that the changeover is being rushed and the process for selecting hub providers is unclear.

The hubs face the huge challenge of delivering more with less. What will that mean for the less privileged? And what will it mean for England’s music teachers?