Primary Music Magazine
Issue 2.0 Summer 2018
Head teachers and your school’s senior leadership team are likely to be personally supportive of music. However, they are caught professionally between a rock (finance) and a hard place (accountability) when it comes to music in schools. With budgets still under pressure, school leaders need your help to make the case for music.
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by Henry Vann & Kevin Rogers Incorporated Society of Musicians
Making the Case for Music Above all else, you need good quality music teaching that is creative, imaginative and inclusive: make it so strong that students and parents demand that your school continues to support music.
To demonstrate the quality of your curriculum (and wider work), do you conduct student interviews and share the outcomes with SLT? Have you ever encouraged parents to send in letters about the difference music is making to their children? Feedback comments from your local community after musical events could be helpful too. If pressures still exist, encourage SLT to consider the overall value of expenditure on music and not simply the specific cost of supporting, for instance, instrumental / vocal lessons for some students. We have gathered together the following suggestions from conversations over many years which we hope might be helpful as you make the case for music. To demonstrate the value of school expenditure on music, we have to be able to demonstrate that all pupils genuinely engage with and benefit from music. Do all pupils regularly hear music played by students in assemblies, formal and informal concerts? For instance, can soloists for a concert do a practise run in front of their classmates? Do instrumental learners always bring their instruments to class lessons, so that their peers can benefit from their expertise? Do informal musical events genuinely enable all students to participate? And who is involved: have you made sure you can track the involvement of children who are looked after, those entitled to pupil premium support and those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), etc.? Do you routinely get students to describe the impact of musical events they have attended or participated in – and share this feedback with SLT? These are all important factors to consider when proving to senior school leaders the value of music within our own institutions. But there is also wider research that we can draw on. There are of course many resources out there demonstrating the positive impact of music education but here are two that draw a lot of evidence together – This is your brain on music by Daniel Levitin, and Professor Susan Hallam’s excellent review of evidence in The Power of Music which is available on the MEC website. You can use these resources to find the research on how music can support whichever specific aspect of learning / brain development is the current focus of your school. More focused on the impact of learning an instrument is the recent pilot study by Professor Susan Hallam and Kevin Rogers, published in the
