Music Education: State Schools

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, on her comprehensive introduction and the noble Baroness, Lady Debbonaire, on her passionate maiden speech.

In Keir Starmer’s Guildhall speech in March last year, he said that

“from day one, Labour will reform the school accountability framework, to make sure arts count”.

Day one is long gone, but the accountability measures, which have nothing to do with the curriculum per se, are still with us. We should remember that both the EBacc and Progress 8 were introduced to prioritise academic subjects and therefore lessen the importance of arts subjects. Removing them is an essential prerequisite for improving not just music education in our schools but arts education more generally. Music needs to be fully brought back into our schools and the resources and funding should be made available to do so, as they should be for all art subjects.

On the pipeline, the sectoral plan published yesterday was a plan for the more commercialised end of the creative industries. It was not a plan for the arts. Depressingly, the cuts to DCMS funding announced in the spending review appear to confirm this. I understand the Government’s wish to capitalise on the areas which are already highly commercial—it is what the previous Government did—but that combination of local authority and DCMS funding allowed both necessary and innovative work in music, including classical music, dance, theatre and the visual arts to flourish, while feeding into the commercial end of the ecosystem. This requires, and has always required, government investment, which nevertheless gets repaid many times over both artistically and financially, as the recent Arts Council England report Leading the Crowd demonstrates. We urgently need that plan—a plan for the arts—because without it even a good music education will be worth far less.