Music Education

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Schools (Damian Hinds)]

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North (Sir Michael Ellis) on securing a debate on this important subject, and on what is an unusually well-attended Adjournment debate. I thank all his colleagues—all our colleagues—from Northamptonshire for being here. My right hon. and learned Friend is a former arts Minister, and I commend him on the great work he did in that role, including his very important work on public libraries as well as on music. I know that music is a subject very close to his heart, as it is to the hearts of so many of us in this place, including my own.

My right hon. and learned Friend mentioned my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Nick Gibb). As our right hon. Friend has often said, studying and engaging with music is not a privilege, but a vital part of a broad and ambitious curriculum. All pupils should have access to an excellent music education and all the knowledge and joy it brings. This is why music is part of the national curriculum for all maintained schools from the age of five to 14, and why the Government expect that academies should teach music as part of their statutory requirement to promote pupils’ cultural development.

Music, like every subject, is generally funded by schools through their core budget. In the November 2022 autumn statement, we announced an additional £2 billion in each of 2023-24 and 2024-25, over and above the totals that had been announced at the 2021 spending review. In July 2023, we announced an additional £525 million this year to support schools with the teachers’ pay award, and £900 million in 2024-25. The Government have continued to provide additional funding, over and above school budgets, to enable children and young people to access high-quality music and arts education. From 2016 to 2022 we invested £714 million, and we are investing £115 million per year up to 2025. Altogether, since 2016, this sums to close to £1 billion for a diverse portfolio of organisations over those years.

That sum includes £79 million a year for music hubs, as was mentioned by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North and by the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), who is no longer in her place. Hubs provide specialist music education services to around 87% of state-funded schools, and over £30 million a year goes to the music and dance scheme, which provides means-tested bursaries to over 2,000 young people showing the greatest potential in those art forms. It also includes a growing cohort of national youth music organisations, with new additions such as the National Open Youth Orchestra, which works with young disabled people, and UD, which runs programmes including Flames Collective, its flagship pre-vocational creative development programme. It was great to see Flames Collective perform with Raye at this year’s Brits. As part of the refreshed plan, the Government continue to invest £79 million a year in music hubs, as well as providing an additional £25 million of funding for musical instruments.

On the teachers’ pension scheme—the TPS, as it is commonly known—the Department for Education has secured £1.25 billion to support eligible settings with the increased employer contribution rate in financial year 2024-25. That will mean additional funding of £9.3 million for local authorities for centrally employed teachers, including those employed in local authority-based music hubs. The Department has published the details of the additional funding for mainstream schools, high needs and local authorities with centrally employed teachers. I can also confirm that the Department is committed to providing funding to cover the increase in employer contribution rates for existing non-local authority hubs for the current academic year—that is, until August 2024—and officials are working to agree the precise amount. Further details, including funding rates and allocations, will be provided soon.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North will know there is a music hubs competition in progress. Following its conclusion, which is due to be announced next month, the Department will work with Arts Council England to set final grant allocations for the newly competed hub lead organisations that will take over from September. As part of that work, due consideration will be given to additional pension pressures due to the increase in employer contributions through the TPS.

We know that, while potential is equally spread throughout the country, opportunity is not. As part of levelling up, our plan is to provide an additional £2 million of funding to support the delivery of a music progression programme. This programme will support up to 1,000 disadvantaged pupils to learn how to play an instrument or sing to a high standard over a sustained period. Further details about the programme will be announced in the coming weeks, once a national delivery partner has been appointed.

We know that many schools across the country deliver first-rate music lessons to pupils and offer high-quality extracurricular activities as well. However, we are also aware that there are some areas where music provision may be more limited, and to address this a refreshed national plan for music education was published in June 2022. That plan clearly sets out the ambition of the Government up to 2030 that every child, regardless of circumstance, needs or geography, should have access to a high-quality music education—to learn to sing, play an instrument and create music together and have the opportunity to progress their musical interests and talents.

[Mr Hollobone]

I thank the Minister for his response so far. Encouragingly, he is moving in the right direction. Does he recognise that Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts Trust has warmly embraced the publication of the Government national plan for music education, the title of which is “The power of music to change lives”? Is the Minister impressed by the reach of NMPAT to over 53,000 children across Northamptonshire and Rutland? Not many music hubs have that scale of reach.

[Damian Hinds]

I echo my hon. Friend’s words about the power of music, and I join him in paying tribute to the great work of NMPAT. I do not have the statistics at my fingertips to assess where in the table, as it were, those thousands place it relative to others, but it certainly is a very impressive reach.

The expectations set out in the plan, starting from early years, are unashamedly ambitious, and informed by the excellent practice demonstrated by so many schools, music hubs and music charities around the country. As highlighted in the Ofsted “music subject” report published late last year, we know some schools do not allocate sufficient curriculum time to music. Starting this school year, schools are now expected to teach music lessons for at least one hour each week of the school year for key stages 1 to 3 alongside providing extracurricular opportunities to learn an instrument and sing, and opportunities to play and sing together in ensembles and choirs. We are monitoring lesson times to ensure that that improves.

Another weakness in some schools that was highlighted in the Ofsted report was the quality of the curriculum, in which there was insufficient focus on musical understanding and sequencing and progression. To support schools to develop a high-quality curriculum we published a model music curriculum in 2021, and, based on a survey of schools from last March, we understand that around 59% of primary schools and 43% of secondary schools are now implementing that non-statutory guidance. We want to go further in supporting schools with the music curriculum, which is why we published a series of case studies alongside the plan to highlight a variety of approaches to delivering music education as part of the curriculum. We are also working with Oak National Academy, which published its key stage 3 and 4 music curriculum sequence and exemplar lesson materials late last year, with the full suite of resources to follow in the summer.

While the refreshed plan rightly focuses on the place of music education in schools, it also recognises that music hubs have a vital role in supporting schools and ensuring that young people can access opportunities that schools on their own might not be able to offer. I join colleagues in paying tribute to the work of our music hubs across the country, including the organisations who lead them and their partners, who for the past 12 years have worked tirelessly to support music education.

One such organisation is of course the Northamptonshire Music and Performing Arts Trust, which I was pleased to hear my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North speak of in such glowing terms. I join him in thanking its chief executive, Peter Smalley, who I gather might be with us today. Just last week I had the privilege of seeing the work of another music hub in Surrey. I was very impressed by all that its partnership is doing to support schools to provide high-quality music and offer amazing opportunities to young people also beyond the classroom.

This year, hubs have continued their excellent work against the backdrop of a re-competition of the lead organisations led by Arts Council England. I recognise that that will not have been easy. As no announcement of which organisations will be leading the new hubs has yet been made, Members will understand that I cannot comment on the individual circumstances of any organisation currently in receipt of hub funding.

From September a new network of 43 hubs made up of hundreds of organisations working in close partnership will continue to build on the outstanding legacy of the hubs to date, and I offer my wholehearted thanks to everyone who has played a part in the music hub story so far. It will be exciting to see how the new hub partnerships develop and flourish with the support of the announced centres of excellence, once they are in place.

One area where hubs provide support to schools is in helping them to develop strong music development plans. This year we have invited every school to have a plan that considers how they and their hub will work together to improve the quality of music education. Our sample survey of school leaders last March showed that slightly under half of schools already had a music development plan in place. Of those, the vast majority—nine in 10—of school leaders intended to review it for this school year. Of those without a plan, nearly half reported intending to put one in place this school year. I hope it will not be long before every school has a strong music development plan that sets out how the vision of the national plan is being realised for their pupils.

The quality of teaching remains the single most important factor in improving outcomes for children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. We plan to update our teacher recruitment and retention strategy and build on our reforms to ensure that every child has an excellent teacher, and that includes those teaching music. Our strategy update will reflect on our progress on delivering our reforms, as well as setting out priorities for the years ahead. For those starting initial teacher training in music in academic year 2024-25, we are offering tax-free bursaries of £10,000. That should help attract more music teachers into the profession and support schools in delivering at least one hour of music lessons a week. The Government will also be placing a stronger emphasis on teacher development as part of the music hub programme in the future, including peer-to-peer support through new lead schools in every hub.

There is fantastic music education taking place across the country. Indeed, the opening remarks of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Northampton North did a better job at bringing that to life than I ever could. For my part, I offer and add my thanks to every music teacher in every setting for all that they do, but there is still a lot to do to make our vision for music education become a reality for every child in every school. I am confident, however, that our reforms are having an impact and will lead to concrete action that every school and trust can take to improve their music education provision. Through partnership and collaboration with hub partners, we will ensure that all young people and children can have access to a high-quality music education.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Following this excellent debate, I am going to go to a reception sponsored by Mr Speaker with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It struck me that we have all the orchestras, sinfoniettas, musical theatre and musicians generally—all these incredible talents—and I wonder how many of them started their lifelong love affair with music by picking up a musical instrument in school. We are so fortunate.

Question put and agreed to.