Music: Teachers

(asked on 27th October 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to encourage professional musicians (1) to teach music to young people, and (2) to help young people to become music teachers.


Answered by
Baroness Barran Portrait
Baroness Barran
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This question was answered on 8th November 2021

The government has a long-term commitment to ensuring that high-quality music education is not the preserve of the elite, but the entitlement of every single child. Music education remains a central part of a broad and balanced curriculum in schools, and that is why music is a statutory subject from age 5 to 14 in the national curriculum, and why pupils have an entitlement to study at least one arts subject at key stage 4 in maintained schools.

The department has committed £79 million this year for Music Education Hubs, and a further £1 million for charities which teach pupils about different styles of music and will often work with, and employ, professional musicians.

New trainee teachers are now entitled to at least three years of evidence-based professional development and support. We saw 483 new entrants to music in the 2020/21 academic year. This is 171 more new entrants than were seen in 2019/20.

Our Get into Teaching service provides inspiration to explore a career in teaching and support to successfully apply. Through the service, prospective candidates can access advice from expert Teacher Training Advisers throughout the application process and also identify opportunities to gain school experience in their local area.

In October our new digital service, Apply, for teacher training was rolled out. This is a key milestone in the delivery of a more streamlined, user-friendly application route. Apply will allow us to collect more data and insight into candidate behaviour than ever before. This means that we will get a much more granular understanding of the route into teaching across different subjects and this will allow us to deliver innovative policy interventions in key areas.

Reticulating Splines