Music Education

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the aspirations of the national plan. The difficulty will be in how we deliver against the background of a continuing squeeze in school funding, low pay for teachers leading to well-qualified staff leaving the profession, and the likelihood that state schools will continue to be underfunded for years to come.

We all recognise that substantial additional funding will be required to implement this plan. Since that is not going to be available, we need to look as widely as we can for partners in delivering music opportunities for all children. So I want to talk about partnerships in delivering musical education to state school pupils in less prosperous areas—the sorts of places where schools cannot ask parents to raise additional funds for instruments, for visits to concerts or for peripatetic teachers to come in. I want to talk about partnerships not just with music hubs but with the music industry, independent schools and the charitable sector—forms of partnership that are touched on in the report but, I feel, are not being given sufficient attention.

I approach this from the experience of chairing the trustees of a musical performance and education charity for the first 12 years of its growth: the VOCES8 Foundation. During the pandemic, I learned more about the depth of the music industry’s involvement with education and young musicians from the partnerships among singing ensembles that VOCES8 formed through its successful series of online concerts.

I have also seen a little of musical education on the ground from my children’s experience in state schools, and in the Centre for Young Musicians in London, and now from my grandchildren’s primary school and my grandson’s activities in the Wandsworth music hub—like other hubs, an invaluable Saturday school, with enthusiastic teachers, that offers different kinds of musical experience, from classical to jazz and Afro-Caribbean. My grandson’s violin teacher there last year was a young student called Braimah Kanneh-Mason, something of a perfectionist who nevertheless conveyed his enormous enthusiasm through his teaching.

The VOCES8 Foundation was founded by former Westminster Abbey choristers to provide top-quality musical performance and to bring that performance into schools, to expose children to the wonders of singing and to teach them to sing. As we have grown, we have discovered that many primary schools have no teachers with any musical skills, and we have run a number of course in basic music skills for teachers as a result. The London Institute of Education published some research 10 years ago on the strong positive effect on schools of regular collective singing;

“transforming children through singing”,

as the Voices Foundation, another invaluable charity in this sector, has put it.

We have concentrated much of our educational work on introducing children from schools in disadvantaged areas to singing, first in unison and then in harmony, developing and publishing easy pieces, as the Voices Foundation and others have also done. We have then offered progression in singing, from encouraging a capella choirs in secondary schools to coaching talented teenagers and including them in our summer school—in partnership with another musical charity, Future Talent. I recall a concert provided by pupils from the five Grey Coat Foundation schools in which their a capella choirs performed, in some cases singing pieces that their own members had composed. We have trained what we call young leaders to lead choral singing in their own schools, and we form a group of VOCES8 scholars every year from graduates of the music colleges, who start their careers singing together and work in schools together.

The most dispiriting experience I have had in Whitehall was not long before the pandemic, when I took our educational directors into the Department for Education to meet the Minister for Schools. We planned to discuss our hard-won experience in working in schools where music was almost absent, the techniques we had learned to bring music back and the case for closer partnerships between government and charitable providers. Instead, we were given a lengthy lecture on Nick Gibb’s scepticism about innovation in musical education, with a strong undercurrent that outside providers were more trouble than they were worth. He did offer me a half-apology the following day, but it left our educational team deeply disappointed.

I hope the Minister will assure us that the DfE is now committed to the widest possible partnerships with other providers in musical education, as the national plan at points suggests. I would have placed a stronger emphasis than the plan does on partnership with independent schools. Their facilities are far better than those available to most state schools and their teachers, in my experience, are glad to help talented youngsters from the state sector—although some head teachers are reluctant to share their space with non-paying pupils. Saturday music classes provided by independent schools in partnership with state secondary schools work well in several places. The DfE should press independent schools to regard such provision as part of the public benefit that justifies their charitable status.

I learned from VOCES8’s co-operation with other ensembles during the pandemic that a significant proportion of professional music groups regard education as a natural part of their work. An effective national music strategy should make more of what such groups can offer too, encouraging them to affiliate youth choirs or instrumental ensembles, even to promote joint concerts in which talented youngsters have the chance to contribute to great music with more experienced performers.

I have a lovely memory of sitting in a crowded Albert Hall for a concert in which Apollo5, our second professional ensemble, and hundreds of children from Surrey schools performed, and one of the songs which they sang had been composed by one of the young people in the choir. It was a tremendous opportunity for children to feel that they were performing well for a large audience.

The charitable sector can also raise and provide additional funding at a time when state funding will be limited at best. The VOCES8 Foundation raises almost all its funding for education from private contributions, charitable trusts, our supporting group of “friends” and the surplus from performances. Next Tuesday, I will be watching singing classes in three Bradford schools, followed by a VOCES8 concert in Bradford Cathedral, all funded by contributions raised jointly by the cathedral and our foundation. The latest significant donation to our educational work has come from an American singer who likes our work and who recently recorded with our professional ensemble: Paul Simon.

As our latest Prime Minister has said, we cannot rely on the state to solve all our problems, in musical education or in other areas. The way forward has to be the widest possible partnership with the significant number of charitable providers, well-resourced independent schools and the music industry as a whole. I hope that the DfE is now much more open to that than it was a few years ago when I took our educational team to see a Minister who has now just returned to the department.