Weathering the storms

Dr Liz Stafford discusses challenges and solutions in primary music

No two schools are exactly the same, and that’s especially the case for the schools of our readers, who come from six of the seven continents of the world! You may have specialist or generalist delivery, be a public or private school, have a mixed or mono-cultural school community, be based in an affluent or deprived area, and so on. This means that there is never really a one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges that schools face. However, there are perhaps some universal themes that readers of this magazine will recognise as being familiar issues in school music provision, for which we can offer at least some starting point solutions for schools and even governments to consider.

Lack of Confidence & Expertise

Many primary school teachers receive minimal training in music during their teacher education, leaving them feeling ill-equipped to deliver engaging and effective lessons. Even if they come from a musical background themselves, teachers can feel unsure as to how to deliver music lessons in a pedagogically sound manner if their training has not covered this aspect. And if they don’t happen to have that musical background at all, then they can often have no idea where to start.

The most logical instant solution to this challenge is to buy in an all-singing-all-dancing scheme of work for teachers to use. Some people are snooty about schemes, but in reality if your choice is teaching from a scheme or not teaching at all, then obviously there’s only one choice! Even for specialist teachers, commercially available schemes may well have been designed by a team with a collective level of expertise that is beyond that of an individual teacher. Plus they are major timesavers with no need to hunt around for or create your own resources. However, a scheme can only go as far as the teachers are willing to engage with it. Ideally you would look for a scheme which required teachers to engage with lesson plans and think about their delivery, rather than a plug-and-play option where you simply load up the next lesson and let the screen deliver it.

Of course, what would be much more efficient and effective would be to catch this problem before it hits our schools; by including music as a significant proportion of a teacher training degree. Here in the UK it is not uncommon for teacher training to include only 5 or 6 hours of music in total, so it’s no wonder that newly qualified teachers feel ill-equipped to deliver music once they get into the classroom. Why should individual schools have to spend precious time and budget picking up the pieces of this system when it could so easily, and far more cheaply, be solved before our teachers graduate? The original National Plan for Music Education in England (2012-2020) included a pilot project for getting add-on music content into ITT courses, which was dropped with no real explanation just a year or so into the plan; a crying shame as this was an initiative that could have made a more significant difference to the quality of music in our schools than all of the rest of the plan combined!

Lack of Time and Funding for Long-Term Meaningful CPD

As it stands, then, generalist teachers – particularly those in the UK – are likely to need significant in-service training if they are to deliver music successfully. The most successful commercially available schemes-ofwork recognise this, offering inbuilt CPD modules, in the best examples at individual lesson level, so that teachers can be upskilled as they go.

If your scheme doesn’t have this feature, or if you have decided against the use of a scheme, then your school will need to work out a CPD strategy for music.

The main challenge with this is that to be effective, CPD needs to live up to what it stands for: continuing professional development. Many schools struggle to allocate time and funding for long-term CPD in music, with the worst-case result being that teachers avoid teaching music and therefore become more and more deskilled over time. Sometimes this is about priorities, with schools thinking music is ‘less important’ than other subjects, and sometimes it’s just because there is no money and no time! Many music hubs and MATs in the UK have spoken with me recently about numbers of teachers accessing even free CPD (in all subjects) being way down on previous years, as schools struggle to find budget for cover, and individual teachers feel they have too much on their plates to take on any ‘non-essential’ activities.

If your school is prioritising other forms of CPD over music, there are tactics that you can use to ensure that teachers are getting at least a little bit of regular training. Start by always asking the question ‘what does this look like in music’ during CPD for any general initiative your school is promoting, underlining the point that music is a practical subject which is delivered very differently from other areas of the curriculum.

What does that mean for growth mindset, retrieval practice, reading strategy, and so on? Will these initiatives be successful if teachers don’t know how to deliver them across all subjects?

If you’re a confident musician, you might feel equipped to deliver regular mini training sessions in staff meetings, open your classroom up to others while you teach a demonstration lesson, or take over a slot on your next INSET day. However it’s unlikely you’ll have the capacity to turn this into a rigorous training programme that will effect real change. Some schools who employ a specialist have the class teacher work alongside them, being upskilled as they go, with the ultimate aim of them taking back control of the music in their class. This can be a really powerful model when delivered right; it’s important that the specialist understands that the generalist is not a specialist, and demonstrates techniques, activities, and resources that are accessible to the teacher, otherwise it can do more harm than good!

What is really needed of course, is more government intervention! Governments around the world have shown it is perfectly possible to ringfence funding for CPD and mandate that teachers are released for a certain amount of training per year. This takes all the stress away from the individual teacher and the school, since the training is required, and paid for! The, still fairly new, UK government recently indicated that they would bring in a Teacher Training Entitlement for ongoing professional development, and we await further details of that with healthy curiosity!

Lack of Budget and Space for Effective Resourcing

Music education requires proper instruments, technology, and resources for effective learning. However, budget constraints mean that many schools operate with outdated or insufficient equipment. In addition, the lack of suitable teaching space in some schools limits the scope of practical activities, making it difficult to deliver a full curriculum.

Much like the CPD issue, there can be many reasons behind this particular challenge. Sometimes there is no money. Literally no money. In which case, schools might explore alternative funding sources such as grants, fundraising events, and partnerships with local businesses. Sometimes though, it’s about priorities, with schools thinking of instruments and music equipment as a ‘nice to have’ rather than an essential resource. In this scenario it can often help to point out the statutory requirements of the curriculum in the country in which you teach. If it says you have to teach instruments, and you don’t have any instruments, then you are not meeting your statutory requirements, and that could get you into trouble with whoever the regulatory body overseeing schools in your region is. I recently saw an anecdote on Twitter (don’t make me call it X!) where a teacher was told there was no more money for pencils, so he taught for an entire week without making the children write anything down and guess what? The next week they bought him pencils! I doubt it would have quite the same impact if you stopped teaching music, but it goes to show that ‘no money’ often turns into ‘some money’ if you can get your point across effectively.

Here in England, the previous government recognised that there was a need for investment into instruments, the last big injection of cash for this purpose having been given during the Wider Opportunities programme between 2007 and 2011. As such, the Music Hubs have been given a capital grant to spend on instruments and equipment, and some of them are turning this over directly to their schools. If you’re based in England it is well worth finding out what your local hub’s intentions are for this funding, as they might be able to offer you some support.

If you can’t access funding for new instruments, why not pool your collections with local schools or others in your MAT, cluster or chain? Maybe one school can lend you their djembes while you lend them your ukuleles, and so on? This would ensure that you have a good variety of instruments for your pupils to explore, for only the cost of transporting them between schools.

Competing Priorities Squeezing the Timetable

We all know that there is never enough time to do everything that we want to do in school! The pressure to fit everything in often results in music being squeezed from the curriculum, thanks to its lowly place in the hierarchy of subjects where English and Maths are king. This can be a particular issue in faith schools, which often have to give considerable extra time to religious education, leaving very little time to share between the other subjects.

The solution to this is not to put music on a rota! Music is a practical subject which needs to be taught little and often since it involves motor skills development alongside cognitive work. It’s important to get across the message to those in charge of your school’s timetable that you cannot teach music across big gaps and expect to make any reasonable kind of progress. So what is the solution? Well there isn’t an easy one; at some point some subjects are going to end up deprioritised in favour of others. My advice would be that music is not the subject to pick for this kind of deprioritisation – but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?!

What does help is when government policy underlines the value of all subjects. In England, when the school inspectorate Ofsted changed their framework in 2018, meaning that any subject could be chosen as an area of focus in an inspection, it caused a huge upsurge in schools taking music and the other foundation subjects more seriously. Prior to this, schools felt that Ofsted only cared about English and Maths, so that was all they focused on. 2018 was the first time I started to regularly see headteachers turn up to music CPD and events, and the trend continues to this day. With another change to the inspection framework in the pipeline, I hope that all this good work will not be undone, although I have to say the signs are not good from what has been released so far!

Lack of Proper Support for SEND and Understanding of Subject-Specific Adjustments

Music education should be inclusive, allowing pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) to participate fully. However, coming right back round to that lack of music training again, many schools lack the necessary support and expertise to make meaningful adjustments, resulting in limited opportunities for pupils with SEND to engage with music.

The good news is that there are plenty of training programmes and organisations out there that can help with advice and support for making subject-specific reasonable adjustments for pupils with SEND. The bad news is that if your school can’t afford to provide CPD or appropriate teaching resources, then as far as you are concerned, these opportunities may as well not exist!

A small step that your school can take towards developing inclusive provision would be to prioritise this as the first stage in any music CPD they are organising. If you’re only having one music training this year –or this decade – make it about inclusive practice in music! And if you’re having general training about inclusion, ask that question again: ‘What does this look like in music?’ If your school has someone in charge of inclusion, a SENDCo or equivalent, your school has the opportunity to make it a requirement that this person receives training in subjectspecific strategies, so that they can cascade this information down to other teachers. In England, each Music Hub is required to have an Inclusion Lead; so if you’re based here, find out who yours is and what they can do to support you.

The majority of governments already mandate that education should be accessible to and inclusive of pupils with SEND, but in an underfunded, over-worked system, this is not enough. Governments need to ensure that teachers are fully trained in all aspects of subject-specific inclusive practice before they enter the workforce, and that sufficient funding is available to deliver the reasonable adjustments that our SEND pupils are entitled to and deserve.

Your own school may be experiencing some, or all, or none of these challenges! But what is clear is that while schools can and will step up to implement their own solutions, these can only go so far. Systemic issues within education can be significant barriers to delivering excellent music provision in all settings, and governments must play their part in mitigating these for the benefit of future generations. This doesn’t mean putting money into shiny new initiatives, fronted by ‘celebrity’ musicians, to grab a headline or two; these will only ever benefit a small minority of children. Instead governments need to identify and permanently correct the faults within the system to ensure that all schools are equipped with the expertise and resources to teach curriculum music effectively for the benefit of all children.

Dr Liz Stafford is Director of Music Education Solutions®, Editor of Primary Music Magazine, and author of The Primary Music Leader’s Handbook