Music in Education: Government Advisors Have Set a Good Tempo. Can Policymakers Pick Up the Tune?

‘I would give the children music, physics and philosophy, but the most important is music, for in the patterns of the arts are the keys to all learning’. Whether these might be the words of a long-suffering music teacher or of Plato (which indeed they are), one would be hard pressed to claim that they reflect the current state of affairs in British schools. Only last year did a Commons Select Committee clearly state that ‘we remain deeply concerned about the gap between the Government’s reassuring rhetoric and the evidence presented to us of the decline in music provision in state schools’.

Reported in the same publication, Minister for School Standards Nick Gibb MP professed to the Committee a personal desire to increase the number of GCSE Music entrants, whilst reassuring the panel that ‘we take music and the arts extremely seriously’ and that student uptake of arts subjects at GCSE had remained ‘broadly stable’. Whether or not Mr Gibb truly wishes to boost GCSE Music uptake, current measures are clearly not working, and to say that arts subjects have remained ‘broadly stable’ is broadly inaccurate. In fact, current educational policy appears to be having quite the opposite effect. The bleak reality of the situation is that over the last five years, whilst overall GCSE entries have seen an 8.6% increase, Music has seen a 16.1% decrease.

The situation is ever more dire at A level, with England seeing a 38% decrease in entries between 2010 and 2018, making Music one of the fastest disappearing subjects. The time allocated to music teaching in Years 7–9 in state secondary schools has dropped by 26.7% since 2010, and The Cultural Learning Alliance estimates that arts GCSE uptake in general has reduced by 28%, arts subject teaching time by 17% and the number of specialist secondary school teachers by 16%.

Although there will be many factors at play in Music’s decline in schools, the phasing in of the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and its accompanying accountability measures are certainly major culprits. Music is not an EBacc subject, nor is it one of the subjects double-weighted in the Progress 8 school rankings framework. This has led to many schools steering time, resources and pupils away from Music and other creative arts subjects, as results in these have essentially been deemed irrelevant by the current assessment criteria as to what makes a school successful, at least on paper. In some instances, having students entered into non EBacc subjects can even hurt a school’s averages. The Select Committee made it clear that ‘the transformative potential of music and arts education, both to schools and individual students, is not recognised by the current inspection system.’

Naveed Idrees took a radical approach to turning around a failing Bradford primary school, bucking this sad trend by placing Music and especially singing at the centre of the school’s educational ethos. He echoed the Committee’s sentiments saying that this narrow inspection framework ‘sends the wrong message out to schools […] that what is important is what is measured,’ potentially treating children as ‘just numbers in a statistical game’. His own statistics speak volumes however as, voiced in the same publication, in just 6 years he took his school from special measures to having 98% attendance with 80% of students achieving the expected standards in reading, writing and maths, the national average being 65%.

There has been no dearth of state-sanctioned voices imploring the government to overhaul the EBacc and halt the demise of Music in schools. The Select Committee congratulated Mr Idrees’ work, strongly recommending that the Department for Education make such case studies readily available to other headteachers and education leaders. The recent State of the Nation report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Music Education implored the Government ‘to encourage all schools to embed a culture of singing via classroom teaching’ and that ‘the English Baccalaureate and Progress 8 accountability measures should be reviewed and reformed to provide a better education for our children.’ But are those at the top listening to these tunes, or are they simply falling on deaf ears?