Supporting practice-sharing: what's Youth Music doing about it?

If… …practice-sharing is a key to unlocking and harnessing the intelligence that’s spread across the 30,000 people in and around music education, …and practice-sharing also requires a bottom—up approach that needs more than just the efforts and direction of big infrastructure, …then how can we help practice-sharing to happen on a bigger, and more effective scale?

Here are some of the things that Youth Music is doing to support a broader, sector-wide development of practice and knowledge sharing:

• the Youth Music Network has been developed to be a platform where people in and around the music education community, whether funded by Youth Music or not, can share their practice and learn from other people’s experiences, where they can communicate about themselves and their work, and where they can build or participate in online learning networks
• We’re encouraging an approach based on effective practice – practice that’s effective in achieving outcomes – rather than good, or best practice – practice that one person values but another might not. Someone might criticise someone else’s practice, because they don’t like it, or perhaps because they don’t like the music that it works with, but they might still be able to recognise that it is effective, at which point they can hopefully learn from it.
• Youth Music’s new funding programme is built around an outcomes approach. As part of that, we’re asking all funded organisations, as one of the outcomes they achieve with Youth Music funding, to share the effective practice that they develop. We hope that much of this will be shared through the Youth Music Network. So with every funding grant, we’re hoping that organisations will not just do what they do, but also able to share it, so that others can learn from what they do.
• And through our funding modules, we’re supporting certain kinds of activities and projects specifically that encourage practice sharing, particularly the spotlighting and networking modules.
• Over the past couple of years, we’ve been piloting an approach called ‘spotlighting’, which supports organisations to share their individual practice, which we and they will be putting up on the Youth Music Network, several examples of which are already live on the site.
• And we’ve been undertaking and publishing a series of evidence reviews, that look across the sector for evidence of the impact that music can have on particular groups of children and young people: early years; looked after children; those in the youth justice system; young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs); and children and young people with special educational needs working with music and technology.