Music and Dance Schools: Affordable Access

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, Britain’s reputation as a global creative powerhouse rests on the strength of its education system, yet while other nations expand investment in creative learning, we appear to be retreating from it. The recent decision to remove bursaries for music and art teachers, at a time when recruitment for secondary music trainees meets barely 40% of the Government’s own target, illustrates starkly this contradiction.

The Department for Education claims that music teacher recruitment has risen by 53%, which is very welcome, but this represents recovery from an exceptionally low base and not success. Meanwhile, 42% of state schools had no students entered for GCSE music in 2022-23, up from 28% in 2016. Against this backdrop, the removal of support for training new teachers seems a puzzling way to rebuild capacity. As the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, said, the disconnect between rhetoric and reality undermines confidence. Ministers speak of restoring creative education, yet their departments steadily dismantle the infrastructure needed to deliver it. It is as though the ghost of former Minister Nick Gibb still haunts the department’s corridors, his philosophy lingering in policies that reward STEM while quietly trimming the arts.

I ask the Minister who in the department is driving these decisions. How do they align with the Government’s stated commitment to creative education? The music and dance scheme embodies what is at stake—eight specialist schools nurturing 940 gifted young people, many from low-income families—yet its funding has been frozen since 2011, losing a third of its value in real terms. A modest £4 million uplift and multiyear funding would secure these pathways and show that the Government’s cultural ambitions are more than words.