Music Education for Children with Physical Disabilities

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Wednesday 30th July 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister very much for the opportunity for us to discuss such an important topic as music and children with physical disabilities. I see music and differently abled children as going together like the proverbial horse and carriage. As a Music Therapy trustee, I recall a boy with an immovable body and just one flailing arm. A music therapist sat beside him—an elderly lady—and went tap, tap, tap with a tiny drum and she watched his arm. She came back several times a week to sit beside him. She tried to follow his flailing arm with the tapping of the drum and after weeks of external pursuit by the musician of drum-arm co-ordination, with the drum determinedly chasing the formless jerking of the wandering arm, the boy’s mind had taken in the principle and the arm began to lead the drummer. Many months on, his arm was steady, controlled and he began to be able to take food to his face and his face regained control. After a while he found himself and he could eat, masticate and swallow. His life was transformed by music therapy.

I recall another boy who was completely unable to control any of his limbs and was confined to a wheelchair at the age of 11. He became a pupil. Little by little the clear rhythm of music, played live beside him, focused his mind and body. Time passed and all his limbs and his trunk as well became responsive to the music. That boy learnt to walk and his wheelchair was permanently discarded. Music has powers that other taught subjects cannot replicate. All babies are born with perfect pitch and unknowing of any of their specific personal disabilities. Each one is thus innately musical. All disabilities can be helped by carefully tailored musical training.

One in 1,000 children in England and Wales under three years of age are profoundly or severely deaf. The figure rises to two children in 1,000 between the years of eight and nine. Music can help them too: to speak, lip read, listen more effectively, increase their vocabulary, write better, enhance their sport and physical performance, and socialise. The Mary Hare School for deaf children puts music at the heart of its curriculum. The Mary Hare Foundation’s purpose-built Arlington arts centre houses, among other specialties, the Nordoff Robbins Mary Hare music therapy unit, which teaches pupils individually, from primary to sixth form.

A lively school orchestra with all instruments learns and performs across the music spectrum—an early favourite was something called “Dirty Custard”—and new instruments are sought and found. The recent and beautiful samba instruments were given by the EMI foundation. Volunteers from Vodafone locally often fundraise. Choral singing and individual instrumental performance are regular occurrences for outside audiences. These are profoundly and severely deaf children in the category that I have defined.

I should add that Mary Hare is a non-maintained school, so pupils are funded by the local authorities where they live. Fundraising is therefore essential to help families to send children to that school from around Britain and abroad. Early this year, the then principal, Tony Shaw, learnt that a no-notice inspection by Ofsted was about to begin. It did, in an hour and a quarter. The resultant report declared:

“Exceptional personal and academic opportunities ensure that the school makes an enormous difference to the lives of its Pupils”.

It also said:

“Behaviour is impeccable … Attendance is excellent … Pupils value their school and quickly make friends”.

As the departing principal commented:

“Mary Hare is more like a family, and I know that is a key factor in the success we achieve”.

I spoke to him and I am confident that this success will continue to be delivered under the new principal, Peter Gale, with whom I anticipate working to develop a strong partnership and a transfer of knowledge for the benefit of deaf children in Romania, especially through musical education and performance.

There is one special difficulty that deaf children face, not just in Romania, but in Moldova, Armenia, Ukraine and other countries in the region. Deafness is thought to equal physical dumbness: not just through acquired dumbness, but through some unknown physical deformity or acute illness that has happened to the larynx at birth. In other words, if you are deaf, you are born dumb also. That is physically understood and is taught by teachers to be so. There is therefore no speech at all and no lip reading. Communication is only through sign language.

Sign language is undoubtedly useful. I recall that at the Mary Hare grammar school for the deaf, our patron visited. She was sitting in assembly on the school stage looking rather unhappy. The Duke turned to her and said something silent. The hall rocked; the children could lip-read, and he had said, “Cheer up, cabbage”. So yes, sign language is useful, but lip-reading is a great deal more so. Sign language has massive defects for learning and for the acquisition of speech.

So, after life in special schools in Romania, who understands? Who will communicate? I serve as High Representative for Romanian Children. I chair the Asociatia Children’s High Level Group. I work with the Minister for Education, Remus Pricopie. We tackle all disabilities, physical and other, with musical instruments, sharing, training, singing and dancing, and the results are amazing. At the moment we have 105,000 volunteers from mainstream schools and high schools, with 59,000 beneficiaries from special schools, day centres and small family-type homes—all pupils and all handicaps. They meet three times a week in school time, with two hours of integrated teaching each time, mainly child-to-child and teacher-to-teacher. We do dance and music competitions nationally, singing, dancing and doing drama countrywide. You can see the children—their stiffness goes, their circulation improves and they begin to be able to move, speak, listen, talk and socialise. There is new family life. The teachers, the parents, the church and state are all involved. I recall so well the wheelchair girl triumphantly lifted and circled in the air above the heads of her steady-handed, sure-footed boy volunteers, dancing with her as one world and all getting golds.

The link most generously offered by the Mary Hare School will enable us all to create a bridge of learning, with music central to it, to enable speech, singing, lip-reading and total communication, to start in two pilot schools in Craiova and Bucharest. Thousand upon thousand of hitherto silent children will benefit from the careful expertise developed here in Britain by the Mary Hare School, aided by my old college, the Royal Academy of Music.

I would welcome the Minister’s support for this initiative. I would appreciate a word or two with him at some suitable moment to introduce him to the Romanian Minister for Education when he is here. This may be a way in which Britain’s expertise can be developed and spread more widely still.