On the transient illusions of freedom

I’ve been involved in some twitter/X conversations recently which have made me think about the specificities of being deeply rooted in a singular context. As part of my job (although I retired at Christmas 😊) I visited – and still continue to visit actually – many, many schools, and got to talk to teachers in lots of different contexts. One of the advantages of that was it gave me an overview of different glimpses of the same perspective. One thing I have always been struck by is how firmly rooted teachers are in their own contexts, and peering over the walls is really hard!

What made me think on this more recently is when I hear people say that, for them, in their context, SLT are great, listen to them, are respectful and supportive, and all is as well as it can be, and the music teacher can get on and teach what and how they like. Let’s call this person teacher A. For people like A, thinking outside the box of their own experience means they don’t know that just down the road, another music teacher has had the thumbscrews put on by SLT, can’t visit the loo without authorisation, and has to teach an 8-part lesson with compulsory ‘do-now’ silent starters, literacy writing five-minutes into part 4, and a recap with written feedback in part 8. This teacher, let’s call her teacher B, is just as good, musical, committed, and hard-working as teacher A, but has a thoroughly miserable time every day at work.

Then there’s teacher C, who has gone through everything teacher B is suffering, and is now basically being performance-managed out of the school, and, possibly, out of the profession.

Now it’s no good A saying to B and C “oh just be positive, everything will be fine – it is for me (smiley face)”, because it won’t be. 

I’m not making any of this up, by the way, can I say, these are real examples, and I have multiple instances of each (except the 8-part lesson, and visiting the loo, fortunately!).

I am not writing this to be full of doom and gloom for a Monday morning, but I have long thought that we systemically in music education ought to shout about what is good, yes please, as loud as possible, but also we ought not to rub the noses of our suffering colleagues in the mud by telling them to “be more like teacher A”, when what is really needed is for their SLT to be more like A’s.

Now, I may well get shouted at for being a doom-monger (again), but I do worry. All it takes is a change of headteacher, and the remaining SLT, chameleon-like, who were supportive of music suddenly aren’t, or an aggressive MAT stance provokes new things which aren’t helpful to music, and things can change almost overnight. So even for those with very green grass indeed, things might change.

What I am saying is, let’s try and remember our colleagues, and that whilst we may be doing well, and having a good time, others, doing the same things, are under the cosh, and they need our thoughts too.

Sorry for being grumpy, but all the unsolicited emails I get telling me things like this mean I feel I need to say something!

A chat with Music Mark

I chatted with Music Mark about my research, it can be read here: https://t.co/Pr3zjDabUJ

Thoughts on the recent Ofsted Report Main Findings 9/23

This is a blog entry in which I discuss the main findings section of the recent Ofsted report “Striking the right note: the music subject report”, which is available here.

In this blog, I start each bit with a quote from Ofsted, then offer my discussion and comments on this.

O: Music was taught weekly in key stages 1 and 2 in most primary schools.

MF: This hasn’t been my experience, but then it was the Ofsted one. This is why I talk to Masters and Doctoral research students about ‘multiple simultaneous ontologies’, as we are both right!

O: In a very small number of primary schools, pupils did not have enough opportunities to learn music in key stages 1 and 2. 

MF: As previous comment! Not my experience of ‘small’!

O: Inspectors found considerable variation in the amount of curriculum time allocated to music in key stage 3. In just under half the schools visited, leaders had not made sure that pupils had enough time to learn the curriculum as planned by the school.

MF: This I do agree with. The issue of “considerable variation” is a problem, and especially so when the time is inadequate. 

O: In most secondary schools, curriculum leaders organised the key stage 3 music curriculum into termly or half-termly blocks. These blocks typically focused on a different style or genre of music. In most cases, the blocks stood as isolated units. While leaders had considered pupils’ musical development in each unit, far fewer had considered their longer-term musical development across the key stage.

MF: This is another issue that has been bothering me for years. It was long ago that I coined term “Cooks’ Tour” for these sorts of schemes. Here’s an example where I worried publicly.

The issue Ofsted raise about musical development is an interesting one, and I think they are right to use the word ‘development’, although I will now do some head scratching (again) about the differences between progression and development, especially as Ofsted have a tendency to redefine words for their own purposes! But I think progression also matters!

O: In many schools, when considering the curriculum, leaders’ thinking focused on giving pupils a range of musical opportunities. In these schools, leaders often associated curriculum ambition with the range of activities offered. Fewer schools had considered ambition in terms of, for example, incrementally developing pupils’ musical knowledge and skills.

MF: In the past, Ofsted have talked about “doing more of less”, a sentiment I fully agree with, indeed, in the current Listen Imagine Compose Primary https://www.bcmg.org.uk/listen-imagine-compose-primary-2  work I am doing with BCMG https://www.bcmg.org.uk and Sound and Music https://soundandmusic.org we have made “do more of less” a key mantra of the composing work in the research project. 

O: In most schools, the weakest aspect of the curriculum was teaching pupils to become better at composition

MF: This has been the starting point for much of my research work over the previous years. Not only Listen Imagine Compose Primary mentioned above, but Listen Imagine Compose (Secondary)https://listenimaginecompose.com  too was established on this premise. Sadly I worry that this most central part of the music curriculum is being sidelined, and I also hear worrying cries from teachers saying to drop it as it’s too difficult. This, in my opinion, is taking us back to a bygone era, and I hope can be resisted. Sorry if this upsets some, but that’s what I think!

O: “…ongoing feedback…”

MF: I have written frequently about the importance of good formative assessment, and that, for me, is what this comment is all about. I won’t reprise my writings on assessment here, but they all follow this theme. 

O: In a few schools, leaders and teachers had a clear conception of what pupils should be able to do as a result of learning the curriculum. Crucially, leaders in these schools grasped what these outcomes should sound like.

MF: I have often said, “play me a recording of kids’ work in September of year X, then play me a recording of the same kids’ work in July year X+2 (or whatever), and the differences should be audible and apparent”. The key word for me in that Ofsted sentence is “sound”, this, for me, is where all our assessment efforts should be focused. Joseph and his Technicolor spreadsheets are all well and good, but what does the resultant music sound like? This strikes me as where we should be focussing attention.

O: In around half the secondary schools visited, leaders made sure that staff had access to subject-specific training.

MF: To put the boot on the other foot, this means that in about 50% of secondary schools they didn’t. This is worrying, and a job for music education hubs and MATs to address – although this response could be worrying too, as these may be variable, although I have zero evidence for that statement, which for a researcher is a concern, but, hey, this is my blog, I’m allowing myself my own opinions! Also intrigued that this might mean teachers aren’t going to exam-board training either, which in itself is worrying?

O: COVID-19 … Many schools were still in the process of re-establishing the extra-curricular provision they had previously offered.

MF: I am worrying that this could mean a ‘lost generation’ of musicians, we’re looking into this at the moment in BMERG at BCU, so more thinking in progress, with writings to follow.

O: There remains a divide between the opportunities for children and young people whose families can afford to pay for music tuition and for those who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

MF: This is hugely worrying, but hand-wringing alone won’t solve it. We need to think about what can be done, what it will cost, who will pay (as there aint no such thing as a free lunch), and how it can be targeted appropriately. I know there are some rose-tinted rear view spectacles about how things used to be better in ye olden dayes, but see Nigel Taylor’s recent piece for the ISM https://www.ism.org/news/the-microeconomy-of-music-education/ particularly the appendix, where he says “…the system was demonstrably inequitable, unfair, and in some cases prejudicial”. Well, quite! But that was then, this is now, so what can be done? 

O: “Many school leaders reported that in the last few years they had decided to reduce the extent to which they were subsidising instrumental lessons, because of wider pressures on school budgets.”

MF: I don’t think it’s fair to blame schools, which Ofsted isn’t, after all if the roof is leaking, it needs fixing! But, as previous comments, something needs to be done.

O: Approximately half the primary schools visited did not currently offer any instrumental or vocal lessons.

MF: This is worrying. What about National Curriculum entitlement? Should Ofsted be saying this is contrary to their statutory responsibilities, rather than just reporting it? Maybe that would carry more weight? And what about those schools who do not teach/offer music (both primary and secondary) but still get good Ofsted reports? This would be a place to start exerting pressure?

O: In approximately half the schools visited, there was a strong extra-curricular offer that included instrumental groups and choirs. In these schools, leaders valued these activities 

MF: But if we know that Covid has hit instrumental and vocal music lessons, then this has an impact. Another issue is that this relies on teacher goodwill, and if O are looking at curriculum, and SLT are worrying about curriculum, then music teachers can be told to focus on the ‘day job’. One secondary music teacher told me that their SLT had instructed them to focus on the curriculum, and stop X-curric as it was taking them away from “what matters”. This is an issue for some teachers. 

These are just my thoughts on the Ofsted report main findings, and this has taken over 1250 words. I know there are concerns about some of the data Ofsted cite, and also of the small sample size: “This thematic report draws on findings from 25 primary and 25 secondary schools” which is a tiny fraction of schools, and so we need to be wary of generalising from this. 

Anyway, these are my thoughts so far, doubtless there is more to come!

Cultural capital piece

Article by me in August 2023 Music Teacher magazine, where I discuss cultural capital and music education. Available here: https://www.musicteachermagazine.co.uk/features/article/access-and-inclusion-cultural-capital

Rose-tinted hindsight

I am seeing a lot of SocMe posts saying how school music education was great n years ago, where n is often a number involving the author being at school themselves, and benefitting from free instrumental music tuition. I am now of an age where n for me is quite a large number, so I feel qualified by dint of longevity to be able to comment on this, and say not that it is wrong, but it is not right, at least not everywhere! As whoever it was said, “history is written by the victors”, so is what we are hearing in these cases, in other words of music education history being told by the successes, for obvious reasons we hear much less about the failures. 

So, cards on the table, I am clearly one of the success stories. Free music lessons at comprehensive secondary school, very, very low cost Saturday morning music school, place in county youth orchestra, and so on. Then after qualifying I started teaching in a normal comprehensive school in Birmingham. So why aren’t I shouting about how good it was then? Simple. It wasn’t. Yes, I had free instrumental lessons at secondary school, but there were no peris in my second primary school. I moved from London, where I had violin and recorder lessons, to a primary school in Oxfordshire, where nothing happened. Not even my descant recorder was taken out of its box there. The school owned a radio, and we would occasionally sing along to a BBC programme. Why? Well, the school wasn’t on the radar of the county music service. And in those days whether a school got peri music staff or not was down to individual patronage and favouritism from the county music adviser that wouldn’t have been out of place in a renaissance court! For those in favoured places or schools, peri lessons were provided, for others, nothing.

These points are borne out in Cormac Loane’s book “Improvising on a theme: The story of the Birmingham Music Service”, where a former head of service is reported as saying: “As far as [LA music advisers] were concerned, the main purpose of the Music Service was to produce a symphony orchestra for them to conduct”. Loane goes on to observe “that instrumental teaching was mainly concentrated in the … grammar schools and schools in middle class areas of the city” (p34). Loane is writing about Birmingham, but such a pattern was repeated all over the country.

In my years as a music teacher, I had to fight tooth and nail for instrumental music teachers, in the days before the reforming into music hubs. Yes, OK, it was free at the point of delivery to the pupils, but let’s not kid ourselves it was universal. Go to a favoured school and it was there. Go to another and there would be nothing.

And let’s not even start on the classroom curriculum on offer back then.

So whilst us successes can look through the rear-view mirror with our rose-tinted specs, let’s not pretend our experiences were universal. They weren’t. 

So those saying how great it was, and how we should return to a golden age, are actually saying how good it was for them, in their schools. The golden age wasn’t golden everywhere.

Now I know there will be some saying that although they agree with this, things were still better then for the privileged few. That’s a different story, and again I would suggest a reading of the book by Cormac Loane cited above, and then thinking about how far we have come since those days. 

Reference:

Loane, C. (2020) Improvising on a theme – The story of Birmingham Music Service, London, UCL-IOE Press.

In which I worry again about liking ‘classical’ music

There has been a fair bit of twitter activity in the UK recently wherein the status of classical music (yes, I know, but let’s just go with the term for this blog!) is bemoaned, and the solution inevitably posed is more/better music education in schools. Now, I don’t really want to get into the sort of culture wars where we deliberate on the relative worthwhileness of different sorts of music, I’ve written plenty of book chapters and journal papers on that topic, with more in the pipeline. My concern in this blog is the re-emergence of this equation:

Good school music education = making children like classical music

And, by extension:

Bad school music education = not making children like classical music

It’s been a while since I did simultaneous equations, but the rigid dichotomy of this bothers me. Is the sole purpose of classroom music education to “make children like classical music”? Should it be? I know I have written before about this, and compared it with liking food in a blog entry here. What seems to be the case in the latest round of exchanges is something like this:

• Not enough people buy tickets for [my] classical music concerts ➡️
• This is not my fault, it must be someone else’s ➡️
• I know – not enough people seem to like classical music ➡️
• Ah –  blame school music teachers (especially in the state sector), they’re either not there (government’s fault), or incompetent (their own fault), or their degrees are in ‘knit your own synthesizer’, or something else improper (!) ➡️
• If the teachers would do their job properly more people would buy tickets for my concerts 🔝
• (repeat ad lib)

The problem, at least from my perspective, is that we have been here before. Back in what many say were “the good old days”, (spoiler – they weren’t) Enquiry 1 (Schools Council 1968) was published. This was an investigation into school leavers’ attitudes. It observed that many of the students in schools at that time had become disaffected by music in education. Students were asked to list school subjects that they found to be ‘boring’ and ‘useless’, with responses categorised by gender. Music came top of both lists. Those were the days of music appreciation. As Witkin wrote, a few years later:

… pupils are often brought to music as a shrine. It is there to be played or to be listened to but only the ‘Masters’ make it. Such a view would be intolerable to an art teacher … (Witkin 1974: 126)

Now, I’ve got nothing at all against teaching about music from the classical era, heck I’ve done it myself. But if the aim is to ‘make’ children like it, and that is the singular and sole purpose of music education then I think we are both on to a loser, and are destined to repeat the findings of enquiry 1. 

This is not to say that I think everything in the music education garden is rosy, as I don’t. But please, let’s not forget the lessons of the past, let’s also remember Swanwick’s (1999) maxim, and ‘teach music musically’! 

And yes, I know people will write to me with details of their classroom music programme which doesn’t fall into any the traps I’ve outlined, and does indeed foster an interest in classical music in children and young people, but that’s not my point! I bet such programmes do ‘teach music musically’! It’s the unmusical nature of leading children to the “imaginary museum of musical works” (Goehr, 1992) that is troubling me today.

References

Goehr, L. (1992) The imaginary museum of musical works, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Schools Council (1968) Enquiry 1: Young School Leavers, London, HMSO.

Swanwick, K. (1999) Teaching music musically, London, Routledge.

Witkin, R. (1974) The Intelligence of Feeling, London: Heinemann Educational.

Average progress in classroom music? Hmm!

There has been a lot of social media chatter in England recently about Progress 8 data scores, which have been published. This is rather complex to explain for an international audience, but, essentially, Progress 8 is secondary school accountability measure:

“Progress 8 aims to capture the progress that pupils in a school make from the end of primary school to the end of KS4. It is a type of value-added measure, which means that pupils’ results are compared to other pupils nationally with similar prior attainment.” https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1112046/Secondary_accountability_measures_2022_guide.pdf (p.13)

The essential feature of Progress 8 is that it is predicated on statistically average attainment, and, as the government document cited above states: 

“For all mainstream pupils nationally, the average Progress 8 score will be zero” (ibid, p.23) 

The point of this blog entry, though, is not to discuss Progress 8, but that these SocMe discussions set me off thinking about average attainment in classroom music lessons. This is much more problematic, at least in the context of English secondary schools, than it may seem at first glance. I am going to concentrate in this entry on secondary schools, although there may well be similar issues at primary, but that’s a different issue. What, I wonder, does average progress in classroom music in the lower secondary school (KS3, in the local parlance) both look like, and, more importantly, sound like? Now I know we have a model music curriculum, which is supposed to delineate such issues, but I am concerned with thinking about progression which is not deliverology, or of words-on-and-off-a-page syndrome, in other words it is not the writing down of a curriculum document, but the actual music that results from the children and young people who receive it in its enacted form.

We sometimes see published examples of ‘best practice’ in classroom music, but again, I am not concerned with a tiny minority of schools so well-funded and resourced, or with an abnormally high prior-attaining pupil cohort, but with normal, everyday schools. And here, I feel, that there are likely to be many examples. 

I repeat: What does average progress in classroom music sound like? We know that in the National Curriculum music learning is built on composing, listening, and performing, but these are interrelated, not atomistic. We know too that Ofsted have written that

“In making decisions about curriculum content, it is important to consider how the sequence of content develops pupils’ musical knowledge and competencies over time. This review proposes 3 pillars as the basis for progression in the musical activities of performing, composing and listening/appraising. [These pillars are] Technical, Constructive, Expressive” (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-review-series-music)

But again I ask, what does this sound like when average progress is being made? Qualitatively, how does music made at the start of Y7 differ audibly from the middle of year 8, and the end of year 9? These things really matter, as we know that progress is a vital ingredient in music making, yet the prime issue, that of quality of music being made, remains, for many, an elusive concept. Maybe this is elusive systemically too, perhaps? I have written before about Pirsig, in his seminal 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance making this highly pertinent observation:

“Quality — you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on?”  (Pirsig, 1974, p187)

And this, for me, is a big issue. What is audible quality in classroom music making? We know from the ABRSM and Trinity College graded music exams what a ladder of progression sounds like in instrumental music, but what about classroom music? How does a school that has been focusing on singing (say) sound progressively (actually I prefer ‘progressionally’, as ‘progressive’ has a problematic meaning in music education for some!) differ from one where the children and young people have been composing using ICT, one where there are rock bands, one where musical futures is the main modality, one where all the youngsters learn an orchestral instrument in class time, one where tuned percussion, or guitars, are the main modality, and so on. Again, I repeat, what does average progress in classroom music in each of these instances sound like?

One of the many issues for us in music education is that we start to get bound up in issues of ideology very quickly at this juncture, “well, if they will do rock music in class what can you expect?” sorts of things (insert any hobby-horse of your choosing for ‘rock music’!). We also get into the ‘could’ versus ‘should’ dilemma. For some, it could sound like this, for others it should sound like that. These issues are not easy to resolve. 

There are many issues that face us in music education in England at the moment, maybe this is yet another that we could/should be worrying about?

In which I worry about a quotation, and think about Mrs Curwen (again!)

I’m supposed to be writing a book chapter, but I got distracted by a quotation, sorry editors! The quotation in question is from Daniel Willingham, and it is this:

“Factual knowledge precedes skill”

Now I know I should provide a full reference, but I’ve moved away from my main computer, and I’m sitting in a comfy chair at my laptop at the moment, so if you want to look it up, please do! But my tangential thinking that stopped me writing a book chapter (where I would have had to reference it, sorry!) was “hold on, is that true in music education?”. And thus this blog…

So is it true in music education? Well, let me do some thinking out loud, as it were, in this blog, please.

When I taught KS3 music, I would often do something using keyboards (or guitars, same principle applies, only the chords are harder!), that we would learn, on the keyboard, chords, C, F, G, and Am (diff on guitar, obviously!); not all at once, but over time – we’d work up to all four of these chords. 

Now, these are clearly chords I IV V VI in C major, and the triads in root position (keyboards now) involve the same shape, although VI is obviously a minor chord, but the same ‘play a note, miss a note, play a note…’ hand shape works. I see this as a skill. We’d learn the names of the chords, C, F, G, and A minor, and we’d play all sorts of music with them, and the pupils would have a go at composing their own music with them. 

Now, where I am getting hung up is I don’t think ‘factual knowledge’ preceded that skill, unless the factual knowledge is ‘play a note, miss a note, play a note…’ etc to get the triad shapes. I certainly didn’t teach major scale theory, or the circle of 5ths, or notation other than guitar chord symbols to go with them, but all sorts of music was learned, and all sorts of music was composed. 

So is this bad? Should ‘theory’ have been taught first? Am I equating ‘factual knowledge’ with ‘theory’? I’ve chosen the chord example as I think it fits with what a lot of KS3 teaching involves still today. Had I chosen singing, I feel that even less factual knowledge would have preceded the skills, maybe?

Even having written this, I’m still thinking about it. As in so many things, I am reminded of Mrs Curwen’s piano teaching maxims of 1886, particularly “Teach the thing before the sign”.

Here’s another bit of a Mrs Curwen book, which is apposite here. (Those aren’t my underlinings by the way, I was sent this.) *

I do like “every musical fact should reach the mind though the ear”. Nice! And no, that doesn’t mean JUST TELL ‘EM, or whatever that shouty meme was a few years ago, it’s about music being musical.

However, as with so many things, I need to think some more about it. And I also need to get back to that book chapter…

Sorry!

(*Gender specificity in the original)

Article in BJME

Another piece by me co-authored with Alison Daubney in the British Journal of Music Education entitled “U-turns in the fog: the unfolding story of the impact of COVID-19 on music education in England and the UK”.

Available free for a while from the BJME at

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-music-education/article/uturns-in-the-fog-the-unfolding-story-of-the-impact-of-covid19-on-music-education-in-england-and-the-uk/0B7C6294FD6A42E5FC4338334323F0C8

Compulsory loving music

I am seeing a lot of posts at the moment about “getting children to love music”. Now, I have no objections whatsoever to this as a laudable aim. However, I don’t think it is that simple. Case in point: I had to do cross-country running every week when I was at school, I hated it then and have never volunteered to do it at any point since. I’m sure our X-country teacher probably had the aim of “making” us like it. I didn’t. What happens if our attempts to do this for music have the same effect? 

I have written about my dislike of Wagner’s music recently here. I can report that at O-level and A-level I had a music teacher who did love Wagner, and could crowbar in talking about Wagner’s music and playing us bits of Tristan at the drop of a hat. I’m sure that the music teacher thought he was doing the best for us, but I didn’t like it then, and I still don’t. Sorry to all the Wagnerians. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, said teacher never played a semi-quaver of Poulenc to us, and yet I am more than happy to listen to that. 

So what? Well, I was reminded of this when digging out an old powerpoint today, and I know I have written and talked about this before. A few years ago I went with some Uni colleagues to Vietnam, on a non-music related mission. Whilst there, we were taken out for a posh dinner in what we were assured was the restaurant to go to, where they served a good example of the local delicacy. Never being one to turn down a culinary experience, I was looking forward to this. When we arrived, the restaurant looked not unlike places I had been in Birmingham and elsewhere.

But … the local delicacy turned out to be unhatched ducklings cooked in their shells, something like this:

Our hosts loved this, and scrunched away happily. Yes, literally scrunched, you could hear the little bones being chewed. 

Now, despite my not being averse to a bowl of jellied eels, or all sorts of other things friends and family despair at, I couldn’t bring myself to eat this, much less ‘love’ it. 

I know what you are going to say, if I’d started young enough, yadda yadda yadda. But some of our hosts didn’t like (or love) this dish, and were thoroughly understanding of why I didn’t . So are they lacking? Am I?

Anyway, the point of all this culinary ambling is that making people ‘love’ music, any more than unhatched ducklings, or cross-country, may not be quite as simple as some people seem to think.

Sorry!