Making the Case for Music

by Henry Vann & Kevin Rogers Incorporated Society of Musicians

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?

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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 British Journal of Music Education (BJME), which found that pupils learning a musical instrument experienced ‘greater progress and better academic outcomes than those not playing with the greatest impact for those playing the longest.’

As well as the above evidence, your local music education hub can be your strongest ally when you are making the case for music in your school. For example, Wiltshire Music Connect, the local music hub in Wiltshire, produced an excellent resource called Why music matters which summarises why music and music education is important.

Even Ofsted might help: there is a growing emphasis on the ‘broad and balanced curriculum’ and if you add to this Ofsted’s commitment pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development then their inspections may be a friend to music.

The creative industries are worth £92 billion a year to the UK economy – that’s bigger the oil, gas, life sciences, aerospace and automotive industries combined! They employ around three million people and are growing faster than the rest of the economy.

But even beyond our own industry, music is clearly a winner. According to figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) four of the top ten universities in the UK for graduate employment are specialist music education institutions. (This figure rises to six out of ten if you include all arts institutions.)

‘During my professional life I have interviewed thousands of applicants. Forced to choose between a narrow‐minded MBA and a broad‐minded, intellectually curious graduate in music, I always chose the latter. I could train the musician to be a smart banker, but the MBA who thought he had learnt everything could no longer be stimulated or moulded into someone who never stops having doubts.’ – Rudi Bogni, former UBS Executive

A major report by Deloitte on the growing threat of automation says that ‘in the future, businesses will need more skills, including: digital know‐how, management capability, creativity, entrepreneurship and complex problem solving,’ and the CBI report First Steps: A new approach for our schools, published in November 2012, identified the preparation of children who are ‘Determined, optimistic and emotionally intelligent’ citing ‘creativity’ as one of those core attributes.

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