King’s Speech

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Con)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness in commenting on the gracious Speech. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness the Minister, whose maiden speech was wonderful and enthralling. I thoroughly enjoyed it, thank her and ask her to pass on my congratulations.

The Minister remarked on the need to reduce inequality of provision in the Mental Health Act, for example. I wonder whether she might like my thoughts and those of my colleagues outside this Chamber on the need to reduce the need for mental health services at all. In other words, we have a rising number of mental health requirements and I believe that that could be tackled before anything else. Reducing inequalities is imperative, but it is more important to reduce the need for mental health provision—in other words, to strengthen the mental health of our total population.

This is particularly important for children, and perhaps that is where I might be able to offer something. We now know that musical training affects cognitive development quite dramatically. There are now studies, which some of my team have participated in internationally, as part of their charitable work. They make it very clear that the plasticity and growth of the brain are affected by music studies. Such evidence has not been available before.

The charity I chair, the AMAR International Charitable Foundation, has access to such evidence because we have been working with the neediest of the needy: victims of genocide. The cultural group in this case is the Yazidis, but it does not really matter which one it is, simply because the musical training we have offered has very clearly had an impact on the brain. By “the brain” I mean, in this context, the mental health of those who have suffered what the United Nations says is the worst crime against humanity of all. After a decade of training, which is imperative inside the camps themselves and with the victims, we have firm proof of the difference that it makes to mental health. Indeed, we have had a tour of the Yazidi choir we formed in Oxford University and in the Jerusalem Chamber, and also in other places in Windsor and Oxford. I hope to bring it back another time before too long, if I can find some funding, because the mental health impact of coming here has been dramatic as well.

Of course, that is not the only example I can offer. As a former student of the Royal Academy and of the Royal College of Music and a graduate in teaching there, I was an early board member of the Nordoff and Robbins charity, which, as your Lordships may know, is one of the most powerful and important international music therapy charities of all. I was lucky enough to be on its board in the very early days. I had to stop after a while because I moved into computer programming, which was non-conducive to the timing of the charity’s board meetings. None the less, I will give your Lordships one example of how music training can impact on physically badly developed people.

A small boy who was a long-term patient in a hospital had only one movement, which was his right arm. He could not control it. It was the only piece of his body that moved at all. It went up and down erratically, all day and all night. The lead music therapist, who was an ancient lady at the time and was very experienced indeed, was asked to have a look. She went into the hospital and sat at the far end of the ward—at that time it was in wards—so the boy did not notice her, and she watched his arm. After a week or two, she steadily moved nearer and nearer to his bed. By the time she was sitting beside him, he did not realise that he was being scrutinised, because she was then a familiar figure on the ward. Her instrument was a very small drum, which she used with her fingers. Sitting by the bed, she watched this erratic arm. After a little while she started tapping the drum in line, as far as she possibly could, with his erratic movements. After about a week, she felt she had mastered the erratic movements and then, the week after that, she taught him to follow her. Six months later, for the first time in his life, this teenage boy was feeding himself.

I say again that the plasticity of the brain is impacted by music training. We now have this information. I therefore ask the Minister to think hard about music in all schools—not music hubs but actual practical music in schools—and about looking at music as a therapy and health tool rather than just as something enjoyable.