Schools: Music Education

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 18th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I can confirm what the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has been saying about the value of partnerships between independent and state schools. At the age of nine I was lucky enough to go to a choir school and thus to drop out of the state sector. The independent school to which my father’s employer then gave me a scholarship had, in those days, pretty basic music facilities. It has since invested in the most superb music and drama facilities, which thankfully it has made available to the state schools around it. Part of the increased gap that we see between the independent and state sectors is due to the fact that independent schools have now developed these superb facilities, and it is important that they share them. That is part of the public benefit that justifies charitable status.

As I said yesterday, I am the trustee of a music charity, the Gresham Centre, which runs VOCES8 and Apollo5. We have actively pursued those partnerships, and the best independent schools now actively take part in them. One has to praise what they achieve. I wish that the best quality would spread further through the independent sector than it has done so far.

My children went to a state school with a very good music department. I recall attending an early school concert there, at which a young woman of Nigerian parentage sang a Fulani folk song. I thought that was just what diversity in school music should be about. My son then went to the Saturday school at the Centre for Young Musicians in London, which was previously funded by the state sector and is since funded by the City of London Corporation. From there, he managed to go to the London Schools Symphony Orchestra and he spent a year at Trinity College, of which the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has spoken. He kept up with the musicians from the independent sector whom he met at university. My daughter was, frankly, intimidated when she arrived at university by the greater self-confidence and achievement of the children arriving there from independent schools. It is sadly that case that music scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge are dominated by children who have been educated in the independent sector, because children in state schools do not get the training and experience to qualify. That is part of the gap that we are talking about.

Where are we? Yesterday, the Minister produced what I felt were rather odd statistics, and evidence that I did not entirely recognise. The extensive briefings we have all received for this debate tell a very different story from the one he tried to tell us. There are two sides to what we are talking about: one is the basic provision of the opportunity to sing and to learn an instrument for all children who go through British schools; the other is the chance for the talented and the interested to progress and learn an instrument to a high quality of performance or to sing with a highly developed choir, and perhaps, in time, to become a professional in either the popular or classical sector.

We have the wider context of the impact of austerity across the board. We know that local authority support for music hubs has been squeezed. We see county orchestras—a valuable opportunity for young children to learn to play to a certain level while still in state education—being cut back. For example, Bradford Council has not only cut much of its support for music but has just closed its final trio of public toilets. Saltaire is a tourist destination as a world heritage site, and I can tell noble Lords that, when you receive busloads of school children and the recently retired who want to look around the village, the first question they ask when they get off the bus is about toilets. The closure of public toilets is an example of austerity at its most acute.

The squeeze on school budgets means that teachers in marginal subjects are not replaced and, with the EBacc, music now looks like a marginal subject. The Minister said yesterday that there are few vacancies for music teachers. But that is because there are fewer posts to appoint them to, and that is not something about which we should be proud.

Last Saturday, in the Yorkshire Post, there was a story on the decline in musical education across Yorkshire. It focused particularly on Foxhill Primary School in Queensbury, in Bradford. As I am sure noble Lords will all know, that is home to the Black Dyke Mills Band. The primary school, therefore, does its best to maintain its own introductory brass band, as well as a school choir. How is it funded? The band play outside Tesco for the four weeks before Christmas, and the school depends on that collection and other donations to support what it wishes to include in its curriculum but cannot otherwise afford. That is the sort of thing schools are having to do to maintain the music.

The evidence of the value of music in schools is overwhelming, and not just from the University of South Carolina, as the Minister cited yesterday. The Institute of Education at the University of London has done research on this in collaboration with my charity, and I am happy to supply that to the Minister if he has not seen it. Collective singing and playing develops discipline and concentration, and is demonstrated to improve numeracy, self-confidence and performance. People often say to me how good the Parliament Choir is. That is not terribly surprising. What basic qualifications do you need to go into politics? You need self-confidence and the ability to stand up on a platform and project your voice. And what do you get from music, particularly from singing? It gives you some of the basic qualifications that you need.

In the context of the charity I am involved in, I watch, for example, the acapella groups we have created in the Grey Coat Foundation schools performing songs written by their members. That is wonderful. It shows self-confidence among teenagers. The other week, I watched the Shoreditch academy choir perform in St Anne’s on Gresham Street, which is our centre. Seeing these mostly young girls singing their hearts out, I know that we are doing something for them. To neglect this dimension of education in order to cut taxes and public spending would be as irrational as cutting spending on the police while claiming to support the principles of private property and secure communities. I am sure that the Government would not think of doing that.

The charitable sector is having to take over more of what the Government previously funded. We are doing that, but the demand is enormous and more than we can cope with. My charity is now involved in training for schools where no teachers have any basis in music, providing them with the core skills to be able to manage a school singing together. The quality of this country’s cultural life matters. The quality of our education matters in the broadest sense.

Yesterday, the director of education for Voces Cantabiles Music at the Gresham Centre sent me a cutting from Singapore. It said that the Singapore authorities are more and more clear that exams and maths are not the full story. When educating children, you need also to inculcate imagination, independent thinking, self-confidence and the ability to work with others. Music does that, and that is why it is a core part of education.

Education: GCSE Music

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 17th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

To answer the noble Baroness’s first question, about where the research I am using comes from, an initial five-year study by the University of South Carolina showed that music instruction appears to accelerate brain development in young children. I entirely accept that, but let us also talk about the amount of time that is being devoted to the teaching of music in schools. Music as a percentage of teaching time in secondary schools has remained broadly stable since 2010: 2.4% in 2010 and 2.3% in 2017. I get that data—I am conscious of noble Lords saying that we are loose with our data—from the school workforce census, a survey of 76% of secondary teachers and 85% of secondary schools.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a trustee of a musical education charity which is overwhelmed by requests from schools and music hubs for us to collaborate with them because the number of teachers with training in music teaching is declining and is expected to decline further in the next two or three years. Do the Government accept that music is going to be pushed aside as an extra subject and is likely, in state schools, to be provided increasingly by volunteers and charitable bodies?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the vacancy rate for music teachers in schools is currently 0.6%, so I do not believe that there is a crisis. I am glad that the noble Lord raised music education hubs, which are supporting more than 650,000 children learning to play an instrument. More than 340,000 pupils took part regularly in area-based ensembles and choirs, of which more than 8% were eligible for pupil premium. Music is an important part of our system and the Government are supporting it.

Schools: Music

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a trustee of a musical education charity, the VCM Foundation. Can the Minister give us figures on the numbers of music teachers in schools? We as a foundation have discovered that large numbers of primary schools, in particular, now have no teachers with any musical experience. We and some others are now helping to train teachers without musical experience to ensure that all schools have the opportunity to sing together and to learn to work together in the way that one can do through music.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the most recent figures I have for 2016 show that there is only a 0.5% vacancy rate for teachers of music in state schools.

Education and Society

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 8th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, many of us will have noted the 2017 report of the Social Mobility Commission published last week, with its sobering analysis of Britain’s alienated and socially marginal communities. It documents the widening gap in educational attainment between London and the English regions, with the worst “cold spots” for social mobility now in former industrial towns and coastal communities. It is striking that the map of low attainment, and of high levels of young people not in employment, education or training, matches so closely with those areas which voted heavily to leave the European Union 18 months ago. These areas, the report concludes,

“feel left behind, because they are. Whole communities feel that the benefits of globalisation have passed them by, because they have”.

We have become a more socially divided country, not so much along ethnic grounds as between the more successful and better educated cities and suburbs and the unskilled white working class. Worse, sections of our media and some of our politicians have written these British citizens off as a feckless underclass sponging off benefits and reluctant to work. Furthermore, part of our country’s dependence on immigration from the rest of Europe has come from employers’ preference for recruiting already trained and motivated workers from abroad as against the harder task of training and motivating poorly educated local people.

Broader and better-quality education will not be enough on its own to bring those depressed and deprived communities back into harmony with the rest of Britain. We need, as the Social Mobility Commission also remarks,

“a more redistributive approach to spreading education, employment and housing prospects across our country”.

We need a reinvigoration of local government and local democracy. We need investment in transport links outside the south-east. We need local industrial regeneration, and we need locally available finance to support the growth of local enterprises, which our banks have been so poor at fostering. It goes without saying that Brexit will do nothing to better their chances and is likely to make their situation worse.

However, education and training are essential to social as well as economic recovery, and early years education is the most important priority for children from poor and often vulnerable families, often with only one parent and without the support of a wider family group. I am proud that the Liberal Democrats in coalition successfully introduced the pupil premium, which teachers in these areas tell me has made a real difference to the resources they have at their disposal. I regret that the Conservatives managed to cut back on the Sure Start programme, and I am concerned that continuing cuts in local authority grants have led to some places that most need to provide early educational support leaving many vulnerable children without it.

I say to the Labour Party that increasing public spending on the 50% who do not go to university, all the way through from nurseries to apprenticeships and continuing and further education, should be a higher priority than cutting fees for university students. I dissented from my party’s official line on tuition fees for this reason more than 10 years ago, and I hold to the same view today. Any progressive politician should put improving the life chances of the least advantaged first, before answering the pleas of the more confident and more successful.

There are many other measures we should be pressing to encourage children from those communities to learn, to gain life skills and employment skills, and so to grow up feeling that they are included in our national community. Teacher turnover in such areas is too high; we need not only to grant them more respect but to offer them higher pay and perhaps bonuses for extended service. Teach First has shown how to bring bright graduates with enthusiasm into schools; we should extend that, perhaps by writing off student loans at a progressive rate for those who teach in priority areas.

School partnerships are clearly important in encouraging teachers to stay and in lifting performance. Multiacademy trusts are one way to provide such partnerships, but local authorities should also have a wider role in encouraging schools to work together. The independent schools sector should also do more to support school partnerships, partly, but not only, to justify the public benefit obligated by their charitable status. I have seen some excellent independent/state school partnerships in action, but I am conscious that best practice does not extend across much of the independent sector.

Schools do not operate all year round: disadvantaged pupils fall back every summer. Liberal Democrat councillors in north Bradford have been running a summer school for children between primary and secondary school over the past two years, with, so far, excellent results in helping them make the school transition successfully and continuing to grow and learn. We need both non-governmental groups and local authorities to provide more opportunities for disadvantaged children out of school hours and terms to widen their perspectives and raise their aspirations. Middle-class children benefit, after all, from a range of out-of-school activities from an early age; working-class children miss out on that. I was saddened to discover that the visit to the Lake District which the north Bradford summer school included was for some children the first time in their life that they had been outside Bradford.

Low aspiration flows from low expectations of worthwhile jobs to work for, so the transition from school to work is a vital aspect of successful secondary education. Some employers and chambers of commerce now work closely with local schools to provide work experience and the prospect of training, but, again, best practice does not extend far enough across the country. Further education colleges, which should work in partnership with schools and employers, have been, as the noble Lord, Lord Lingfield, and my noble friend Lady Garden have said, financially squeezed and sidelined. We also need to strengthen the idea of continuing, lifelong education for all, which means strengthening the role of FE colleges in providing it. I wish I could believe that the apprenticeship scheme will help in this respect; much of what I have heard suggests that it will fail to provide the most crucial element, which is a path into skilled work for young people.

The Church of England already plays a constructive part in limiting the disintegration of our divided society. I too recall the Faith in the City initiative, which I understood as an appeal to middle-class and rural congregations to care about and support the Church’s work in deprived communities. Church schools have a good record in providing more than just the national syllabus in education and in providing children in schools with a wider sense of community. I thank the diocese of London in particular for the support it gives to the musical education charity which I chaired for 12 years, which takes singing into state schools that have lost their music teachers and takes musical children out of their neighbourhoods to sing and perform with others—to raise their eyes and voices beyond what they thought was possible.

The Church of England, and many other institutions within our civil society, have much to contribute to repairing the weaknesses of our country’s education and so in rebuilding an inclusive society, but the prime responsibility lies with our public institutions, our state and our Treasury to invest in the quality of education needed to rebuild a flourishing and inclusive national community.