Community Music with Teachers – Tackling the music education crisis in primary schools

Over the last couple of weeks at More Music we’ve become the delivery partners of HMDT in Lancashire and I’ve been visiting loads of schools and teachers and co-delivering music workshops in classrooms with teachers. The aim being to address the lack of creative arts in primary schools and to bring about change. To work out what’s stopping music education in the classroom and to train teachers to not have to rely on the school hopefully having the resources to pay for a specialist to come in (as most can’t afford it), but instead to have the skills and confidence to be able to integrate creative arts practice into every subject. To be able to teach through music and to bring about all the positive changes that brings with it. It’s the very start of a 3-year programme and immediately the key theme and the big challenge is obvious.

Music education is in crisis and teachers are scared.

This is in no way teachers’ fault, I believe that it is a direct symptom of the lack of value placed on art in our society.

That does not mean there’s a lack of ten-year old flautists that haven’t reached grade 5 yet, it instead goes far deeper:

• That there is an almost complete lack of creativity in classrooms.
• That bright but non academically minded students are struggling to find their way into learning.
• That students’ emotional development and wellbeing is being neglected as they do not learn how to express themselves fully.
• That culture and real understanding of cultures, traditions, diversity in all forms is not being roundly developed.
• That pupils have become afraid to take risks and to play as part of their learning.

I also believe that this is not limited to classrooms but goes far wider – but that’s for another day.

This is not to say that the crisis hasn’t been recognised ‘on the ground’, or that teachers are not desperate to try and get creative arts into their schools. There is no lack of value in creative teaching approaches or the benefits of creative participatory arts like music.

Because music has been neglected for so long teachers last experience of music was likely when they were in year 8 at school (which was probably rubbish), save for a half day training on music in their yearlong PGCE. Plus, the rise of TV talent shows coupled with old-school music teaching methods promote the idea throughout our society that you can be either good or bad at music, either through natural talent or years of dedicated practice, that there is no in-between. You therefore have to be able to play viola to Grade 8 or be an Adele like singer to be ‘qualified’, to be allowed to sing a song anywhere that isn’t in the shower. 

For me, Community Music is an approach to bring about change. Whether in an individual or a community or a place or whatever. It is music education but using it as a tool to make something else happen, and if you happen to learn to play the bassoon in the process that is brilliant.

My job, going into schools and training teachers therefore is no different to any other bit of work at More Music. To build confidence in individuals through music. Music is great and everyone can do it (and it can change lives). I fundamentally believe this, and I am yet to be proved wrong.

Teachers that are encouraged and supported in delivering creative approaches to the curriculum that are teacher led and that are playful, process focussed, challenging, thought provoking, artistic and so on will be able to make change happen. It is what is needed in schools to tackle the music education crisis, especially when schools are also struggling with budgets. In implementing an absolutely tiny bit of creative music making in the last two weeks you could instantly observe little bits of positive change:

• ‘Difficult’ kids that ‘don’t engage in anything and are a nightmare’ suddenly creating beautiful lyrics that demonstrated they actually had been listening in lessons the last six weeks they just struggled to communicate.
• Laughter and joy as we wrote and acted out silly songs about seeds and life cycles.
• Faces of pupils and teachers alike beaming with pride in performances of brand-new bits of music that were collectively written.
• Problem solving within non-musical topics as pupils discovered new ways of explaining facts or concepts in order to effectively communicate and express their creative ideas and so on.

Music in classrooms consolidates learning, brings in creative thinking and problem solving to let’s say history - making sure that no one ever forget those facts about Romans. Help kids find their voice, is inclusive of everyone, is joyous and extraordinary and so on. And you don’t need musicians to do it because everyone can create music. A musician’s job, if coming into a school, would be to build on this raw material, to do the musical skills bit that a non-musician probably wouldn’t know – to push things to the next level.

Teachers, from what I have observed, already have the skills to deliver music work to the level needed to tackle the music education crisis. They are masters at teaching and understand pupil development like no one else. They also believe in the value of integrating different approaches across subjects because they see the benefits immediately in front of them when it happens. Sure, they might not know how to play the ukulele but that shouldn’t stop the whole class singing their heart out with a brand-new song they just wrote about magnets, or Romans, or baby animals (pupils generally already know more about sentence structure at the age of 6 than I do). The majority of the time teachers just need the encouragement, the permission, to be able to take some creative risk (and to have a couple of tricks up their sleeve to keep things moving and to get things off the ground).

This is the start of a process. At Thursday’s teacher training event we’ll be writing songs about all this and playing. To start to break down the barriers saying that not everyone can do music. To start to break down the barriers saying that not all teachers can do music with their class. It’s no different to the work we do at More Music in the West End of Morecambe every day, but you do get a fancy interactive whiteboard and a neglected trolley of random percussion instruments.

Music education is in crisis but we’re doing something about it. Shall report back.