Partnership and Progress - The Development of Music Hubs in the UK

I have been travelling to the biannual conference of the International Society of Music Education - https://www.isme.org/ - for 6 years now and have come to see them as an opportunity to learn from the international education community and also focus my own learning and share it with peers and colleagues. For the 2016 event in Glasgow it seemed obvious to bring my involvement in the development of Music Education Hubs to a wider audience.

The main conference followed a brilliant 4 day seminar on Community Music in Edinburgh with 120 people. There, in my role as a Commisioner, I made sure that there was musicmaking and that sessions ran on time, were engaging and fun. I was determined to bring this energy to the main conference where over 1600 delegates moved from short presentations to workshops to symposia and performances.

“Partnership and Progress - The Development of Music Hubs in the UK” was the title for my symposium and I wanted to make it a call to action for the education community in the UK. I chose 4 brilliant speakers and asked them to be provocative and precise, wrote a new song about the past 4 years of Music Hub development and invited our Lancashire Vocal Ensemble (LYVE) to perform. I was excited to see who would come to listen!

My proposal to ISME stated:

“Music Education in the UK is changing rapidly in response to the publication of the National Plan for Music Education (2011) and the nationwide development of Music Education Hubs. A key aspect of this change is to make the provision inclusive for all young people (Social Justice) and to ensure that the provision reflects individuals and communities (Identity). (The bracketed themes were those of the conference as a whole).

The work is of international significance as innovation and new effective practice is developed that challenges the status quo and creates a new world of music education. This symposium will highlight many fascinating initiatives by organisations, practitioners, funders and young people. It will also share research that has been undertaken that has both driven the change and that is starting to assess the impact.

We will ask questions about the regulation of such a diverse landscape by the key funders - Arts Council England and the Department of Education – and seek to develop new understanding of inclusion and progression within music education.”

My own personal experience of Hub development comes from work in Lancashire and Blackburn. In Lancashire the operations group is made up of Lancashire Music Service (lead partner), Charanga and More Music and our discussions and visioning are developing many inclusive creative forward looking programmes. It is an exciting place to be however I am aware that we are in the minority and that there is very patchy provision nationwide.

The symposium was held in the conference room at the Glasgow Conservatoire of Music and Dance and we gathered an audience of 25 people from the UK and around the world. It was a dynamic 90 minutes and the speakers kept to my key instruction which was to make only one point in their 10 minute presentation. They connected together, cross referenced and the discussions that took place in the room following each one were fruitful, interesting and sometimes very insightful.

Read each of the presenter blogs here: