Dropping Pennies….or jigsaw pieces
I feel somewhat vulnerable writing this as what I’m about to explain might make it seem like, before my soon to be explained ‘light bulb’ moment occurred, I was ignorant of what I now so clearly see. But, if the lightbulb has illuminated this new truth to me, then I think that, whilst in the dimness of my ignorance, I was still aware of this thing’s existence, albeit murkily.
Perhaps a better way of explaining my epiphany is that things have now ‘clicked’ into place in my head. That sounds better, yes. So they existed before but weren’t arranged in a nice, clear picture. OK, I’ve got it. It was like a jigsaw and the picture on the box was a sketch of what, only yesterday, I finally pieced together all by myself.
It’s one of those things that you tell people and they say “Yeah, obviously” hence how vulnerable this makes me feel. But to hell with it, YOLO etc.
Being inclusive
So obviously I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about inclusion over the last six months partly cos I like to think and talk a lot but mostly because it’s a fascinating subject. This has helped me get to a point where I felt I was getting better at articulating what it was all about. I came to realise that the biggest job to do was applying the blueprint for inclusive practice to the rest of the work we, as a Music Education Hub lead, do.
Inclusive, not Inclusion
A few weeks ago I found myself saying “We need to develop an inclusive offer, rather than an inclusion offer” a lot. It seemed to express what I felt in a relatively articulate way. What I mean, of course, is that doing some inclusion work isn’t what we want to do. Making our mainstream offers inclusive to those in challenging circumstances is kind of the default setting for most music educators. But that thinking is, I think, the opposite of useful. It won’t ever enable us to create a musically inclusive England.
We have to include the mainstream
What I realised is that the inclusive offer already exists, as does the inclusive workforce, as does the inclusive approach to setting up and running projects and, indeed, whole organisations. But these things only exist in small quantities, in very specific places and we still haven’t got a clear pedagogy for any of it (that’s a separate blog though, I think). What we need to do is make our inclusive offer inclusive to the mainstream.
Take, for example, a SEND music group. The way that group has to be set up and run to enable everyone to take part fully means that anyone who is able to access mainstream provision could, in theory, join in with the SEND group. It also means that any Music Leaders working with that group could work anywhere in the mainstream (technical musical skills aside).
Take the following three statements:
A Music Leader working in a YOI can manage the behaviour of any young people but not every Music Leader can manage the behaviour of young people in a YOI.
A Music Leader working with Children in Care has sufficient knowledge of safeguarding issues to work anywhere but not every Music Leader has sufficient safeguarding knowledge to work with Children in Care.
A Music Leader working with an SEND music group can lead any music group but not every Music Leader can lead an SEND music group.
The barriers of being mainstream
This means that we are letting the mainstream get away with being a bit crap, which is a bit crap. The truth is that you can’t be a bit crap with young people who are hard to reach, in CC etc. It’s as if being mainstream is a massive barrier, which we have to help them overcome.
So making the practice of the Inclusive Music Leader and the Inclusive Project Manager the new standard practice would seem the only logical way of making sure we have an inclusive offer. This means we have to look at the examples of inclusive work and apply them across the board to all our work. That’s choirs, orchestras, youth groups, school instrument tuition, and anything else. Otherwise children will continue to be excluded because they are not mainstream.
Not provision; practice
This doesn’t make our provision inclusive. It makes our practice inclusive. Actually, it means we are making inclusive practice a non-specialist area.
What we are aiming for is simple. It’s a world where these two things happen:
- A project is set up so that anyone, no matter what their needs are, can access it.
- A Music Leader walks into a room and is able to work with any individual, no matter what their needs.
If this isn’t what we are sweating blood to achieve then we don’t deserve to be involved.