Schools: Music Education

Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood both on initiating this well-timed debate and on his thoughtful, wide-ranging and rightly hard-hitting opening speech. I too was fortunate at school to be able to experiment with five different instruments, including the French horn, continuing with two into my adult life. I am currently struggling with grade 4 on the harp.

It is now six years since the Department for Education conducted a review of music education, which led to the creation of music education hubs under the coalition’s national plan for education, and seven years since the introduction of the EBacc in 2011. Therefore, we can now analyse the effects of the change in focus and delivery of education and its impact, both on the musical life in our schools and on our musical heritage.

As many noble Lords have mentioned, research by the University of Sussex supports the claim that the introduction of the EBacc has led to a decline in pupils studying arts subjects in general and music in particular. There has been a 15.1% fall since 2016, and a fall of 7.4% in the past year alone. What a waste of potential. Although it is notoriously difficult to prove causality in the arts, numerous studies show a strong correlation between high-quality, sustained music education and increased cognitive development, academic attainment and spatial awareness in children, and the development of their fine and gross motor skills. There is compelling evidence that musical training sharpens the brain’s early encoding of sound, leading to enhanced performance on a whole range of listening and aural processing skills. Furthermore, children from low-income families who take part in arts activities at school are three times more likely to get a degree, twice as likely to volunteer and 20% more likely to vote as young adults. In an age in which the digital world offers instant gratification, the ability to appreciate the huge rewards delivered by incremental progress through consistent music practice has to be a more worthwhile endeavour than collecting skins and weaponry in the obsessional computer game “Fortnite”.

Sadly, it is not just the provision of music education that is in decline; it is also the quality of that provision. There have been poor levels of investment in teacher training for musicians for years—talented musicians do not automatically make inspirational teachers. Teachers delivering whole-class ensemble tuition programmes—a government strategy for first access to music tuition at primary school, originally termed “wider opportunities” —rarely have high-quality teacher training. This may explain the very low continuation rates from first access to sustained tuition, although costs will also be a factor.

It is not all doom and gloom, however, and I am encouraged to hear, both from my noble friend Lord Lexden and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, about music partnerships growing between independent and state schools. At the most local level, the charity London Music Masters, with which I have long been associated, is a community development programme operating across the three London boroughs of Lambeth, Westminster and Islington, providing free musicianship, violin and cello lessons for 1,500 children each week. The charity targets socioeconomically disadvantaged areas with the objective of increasing the ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic diversity within the classical musical industry.

There are other pockets of excellence. Newham’s Every Child a Musician initiative delivers free weekly music lessons in small classes to 12,000 children in the year groups 3, 4, 5 and 6, and each child has a free musical instrument to keep and free entry to all music exams. Newham has fully funded this project since 2011 at a cost this year of almost £2 million.

From central government, the Arts Council and Department of Education co-invest £925,000 a year on a project called In Harmony, which runs programmes in Liverpool and Lambeth, delivering musical education to 6,700 pupils across 42 schools.

Musical outcomes from charities such as London Music Masters suggest that with the right support and training, musicians can teach whole classes of students and achieve excellent outcomes. Eighteen per cent of LMM students achieve grade 5 by the end of primary school, compared with a national average of only 2%. It is therefore particularly exciting to learn that this small but inspirational charity is also developing a national teacher training programme based on a decade of practical experience. This could bring a sea change in the quality of teacher training across the sector.

I join the many other voices in this debate in urging the Government to reconsider the strictures of the EBacc. I ask my noble friend the Minister what steps the Government and the Arts Council can take to reverse the catastrophic decline in music education, and how they will encourage investment in the training of musicians to provide more efficient whole-class teaching of the highest quality. We owe it to the next generation to ensure that they enjoy a holistic education that not only equips them well for the next stage of their academic learning but provides them with the knowledge, skills and problem-solving abilities that can play such a vital role in their development.