The elephant in the room: young musicians thrive outside of schools

In Youth Music’s twentieth anniversary year, and our own next year, there is lots to reflect on as a sector. At the risk of navel-gazing, what are we and where do we stand?

Having digested the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Music Education’s State of the Nation report, our longstanding instincts as a team, at the interface of music education and youth work, appear to be confirmed.

Namely, music in schools is dying, and we, the voluntary music sector, are increasingly the ones keeping music education alive.

And yet our work gets only a cursory mention in the All-Parliamentary Group report. Why is this?

Are the changes we make to young lives not recognised? Is our dual social and music educational role too difficult to measure? Does our third-sector status mean we are a perennial afterthought for statutory minds?

Educational priorities have shifted so dramatically over the past decade that building long term relationships with schools, with sustained and measurable outcomes for young musicians, has become an exhausting uphill battle for external educators, bridge organisations and Music Education Hubs alike. The report shows no prospect of improvement any time soon.

In the past few years, our Youth Music and partner programmes have been increasingly asked by young people and parents to provide a core music education – theory lessons, instrumental tuition, evidence of musical attaintment in lieu of Music GCSE grades – that was once provided by schools.

Where we once provided an ancillary service to schools, complementing and ignoring one another as the plates periodically moved, our part-time project and others like us provide the only meaningful music education many young people now receive.

We’re fine with this – to a point.

But here’s the elephant in the room. How many of your favourite British artists, dear reader, have a GCSE or A Level music qualification between them?

Pre-Brit School, our icons achieved their status by following their muse, with or without the help of school. Finishing school for non-classical musicians was art school in the sixties, dole in the eighties, pirate radio in the 90s, and just getting out and doing it throughout the ages. Anti-school.

And as Youth Music’s Sound of the Next Generation report points out, working class young musicians are still innovating, unsupported, in defiance of ailing orthodoxies that never did care fully for their needs.

So while we want to see music education revived in schools, we believe that our music sector – Youth Music, its grantholders, our colleagues in the arts, music industry and voluntary spheres – must be recognised for the pivotal role it plays in the development and education of our nation’s young musicians.  

It is we, against the odds, who fill the void.