CME, me, me?
At last! An envelope. After two years of toil, I am now the proud holder of a Level 4 Certificate for Music Educators (CME) - one of few in the Liverpool area.
Since the last National Plan for Music Education recommended a new qualification for music educators, I have pondered the implications for my colleagues at the youth work end of the sector.
When the CME finally dropped, I volunteered myself as a guinea pig. There was no one offering the qualification in the north west, and so, with the help of Chris Lennie at Sky Music Hub, I got in touch with midlands-based Music Education Solutions.
With Youth Music’s support, I enrolled on the programme as a distance learner and set to work. I saw the course morph before my eyes, from what looked at first like a low carb PGCE, to a responsive learning platform with an identity of its own.
The main premise was that the course would wrap around what I was already doing. This meant talking to young people, researching pedagogies, exploring safeguarding, and digging deeper into themes of equality and diversity - bread and butter stuff for projects such as ours.
Alongside course leader Dr Liz Stafford, I was invited by Kate Lowes of Manchester-based music education charity Brighter Sound to address music leaders’ questions. Chief among them, what’s the benefit of doing a CME?
My answers were: 1) your funder likes it; 2) employers might like it; 3) you will feel more professional for having it.
Principally, I viewed the CME as an opportunity to convert my experience in the wild into a format recognisable to employers and funders - perhaps in schools tuition, classroom teaching or in leadership positions - and as a template to professionalise a new generation of music leaders, emerging blinking into a bustling world.
Reservations were voiced by more experienced practitioners regarding its relation to other qualifications, e.g. does it trump a music degree? It remains moot, though as a qualification for working educators, the CME should neatly complement prior music credentials.
The other came from younger practitioners. Is it a lot of work? The answer is yes. And too much work possibly for those on part time, fixed term contracts. The next question was cost, and how aspiring music leaders can afford to take the qualification without the wages or employer support to get them through.
A solution, I suggest, would be a CME Level 2, both more affordable and achievable for aspiring leaders from less advantaged backgrounds. This would help talented but unqualified candidates make the transition into the professional workforce and get the grounding they need to stay there. Furthermore, it would help projects such as ours to invest in the development of staff without the onerous challenge of finding thousands of pounds.
In the meantime, Brighter Sound’s offer of a traineeship with built-in CME raises the profile of the qualification among music educators in greater Manchester and provides a possible model for wider adoption. Fund B, anyone?
A final thought is that in current form, the CME cleaves a tad too closely to a classroom-centric music education template that does not fully fit the practice of Youth Music’s project workforce. While researching pedagogies for the CME, I found none that resembled that of my team or our colleagues, whose approach, refined by Youth Music’s influence and investment over two decades, combines top quality music tuition with grassroots gravitas to effect both musical and social outcomes for young people.
Perhaps, dear reader, it is time we wrote our own.
Garth Jones has over twelve years' experience as a music leader and project coordinator for Youth Music projects. He is currently project manager for the Merseyside Youth Association's Noise project.