Why all this talk of sharing effective practice?

Have you ever seen someone working brilliantly with children and young people’s music-making, or have you developed something incredibly effective yourself, or have been to a conference or training session and been stunned by some new practice, and then thought to yourself, ‘it’s just crazy that more people don’t know about this’?

My role at Youth Music is broadly about managing and supporting new developments in music education, as far as Youth Music comes into contact with them. And we do come into contact with them quite a lot: through funding hundreds of organisations and talking to hundreds more, and seeing and hearing people working up and down the country, in very diverse ways with very diverse groups of children and young people, doing a diverse range of things with music. But of course, what we come into contact with is just a small subset of what goes on.

One of the main objectives, for the Youth Music Network, is to be a platform for sharing effective practice. Sharing effective practice is one of the key pillars on which Youth Music’s new programme is built. So what’s it all about – what are we talking about and why’s it so important? Many of the people reading this will be applying for Youth Music’s funding. As part of the application process, we’ll ask, as you’d expect, what people are going to do with the funding, but also about how they plan to share what they do, so that others can learn from it.

In these blog posts, which are adapted from the launch events we did for the Youth Music Programme in November 2011, I’m hoping to describe some whys and hows of practice-sharing, and hopefully to give a sense of why and how we’ve built practice-sharing into the Youth Music programme.

This is a map of the current membership of MusicLeader – Youth Music’s workforce development network: about 18,000 individuals and organisations. (We hope that they’ll all be members of the Youth Music Network, too, which has grown directly out of MusicLeader.) On this map they’re dots but in reality, these are people – the green dots are individual people and the red dots are organisations of people. This map could fill up to have well over 30,000 individuals and organisations who are involved in supporting children and young people’s music-making: workshop leaders, teachers in schools, professional musicians, young music leaders, social workers, community music organisations, schools, etc. etc. Each of these people has developed a set of experiences – some small, some large – of working with children and young people and music. Supposing each and every one of those 30,000 people has at least one experience from which every other could learn.

• A workshop leader in York is brilliant at engaging disaffected young people in music-making.
• A teacher in a Taunton school is fantastic at working with mixed-ability groups in one setting.
• A professional harpist in Norfolk has found a unique way of getting parents to support their children’s creativity.
• A 14-year-old young music leader in Scarborough has found what makes her peers click and want to find out how song lyrics actually work and influence emotions.
• A Secondary school in Brighton has found a way to engage all of its staff in music-making.

The problem is, that none of them knows about the others. But if we could somehow fix that, then as a sector, we would be well on the way to harnessing our collective intelligence.