OPINION


Hubs, Plans, Partnerships and Bands!


Nigel Taylor examines the role of the emerging local music education hub partnerships as the preferred mechanism for providing music education


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hildren and young people will inherit a very different world to that which we currently know and love. The huge challenges of future society, with increasing


globalisation, emerging economic powers, super-fast technology developments, diminishing natural resources, changing climates, changing patterns of work, make the future demands on our children hard for us to imagine. For well over two decades schools have been implored to provide children with a


broad and balanced (national) curriculum whilst at the same time their success has been judged against narrow measures of attainment. As the curriculum has broadened and schools expected to deliver the latest initiative or government wheeze, the result has all too often led to the cry that children are jammed with more and more information, some of it arguably irrelevant for some pupils, and some of it instantly forgettable by many. And this at the expense of core learning skills, knowledge and experiences that will


not only support children’s learning in and across other subject areas but also enhance their life chances in the future world that they will inherit. Last year Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, said: 'We should do away with the entire school curriculum and have one long music lesson instead. That way we would cover pretty much everything in the National Curriculum, all within an overarching themed structure – and have a great deal more fun


WHO NIGEL M TAYLOR WHAT HEAD OF STAFFORDSHIRE PERFORMING ARTS


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