Henley Review: reading between the lines
The long-awaited Henley Review ‘Music Education in England’ has been released this week, causing an explosion of blogs, tweets, forum discussions, further speculation, and the odd champagne cork (although due to the level of uncertainty still surrounding this maybe a cheap bottle of Cava would be more appropriate).
It is great news that the commitment to provide funding to protect music education is there for another year. The review recommends that funding for Wider Opps, Sing Up, and In Harmony should continue (albeit at a reduced rate), and that transition is a critically important area for development (and it is great to see the recommendation that secondary music teachers should be afforded more time to work with their feeder primaries – see our recent blog post for a fantastic example of this happening in practice). There is also a strong focus on having clear progression routes in place, and on ensuring the most gifted and talented are supported (quite rightly).
But nothing (yet) is proposed to indicate what happens in between all of this. What happens after students have made the transition from the breadth of first access experiences at primary school? They hit that age that Musical Futures has always set out to tackle, where they disengage with music in school at a point where music not only forms a major part of their social identity, but where it can actually help them through other challenges in their lives.
It is a major disappointment therefore that there is a significant lack of focus on secondary music education, both in the review and the response, which can only serve to fuel speculation that music at secondary level is under threat. It is clear that its place in the national curriculum is wobbly at best, and there is ambiguity over what a music offer at Key Stage 4 will look like.
Furthermore, the Progression Routes Pyramid (recommendation 4) implies a narrow ‘journey’ – ending up with gifted and talented students either on the music and dance scheme, participating in national orchestras and ensembles, or in a conservatoire. What about the young people who are immensely gifted and talented but who don’t want to, or who can’t, follow that progression route? The MCs, producers, bands, singer songwriters, DJs...? Or what about those students who may not be highly skilled on an instrument (or even play one), but who just want to stay involved?
Earlier this week I heard a group of Year 10 boys rehearse (in a Musical Futures lesson) a song that they’d just written. It was a fairly typical story – a group of lads who were used to failing at things, but who responded unbelievably well in a Musical Futures environment. Afterwards our conversation went something like this:
Me: ‘How do you feel about that song you’ve written?’
Them: ‘It was amazing. Just amazing’.
Me: ‘Why is that?’
Them: ‘Well we know it probably doesn’t sound amazing to anyone else, cause to be honest we know it's a bit crap. But it’s amazing to us because it is ours - we did it, all by ourselves. That's why.'
So if music in secondary schools is removed, or significantly diluted, what happens to these boys? (And they are just one example – we could find thousands more.) What will they do? How will they be supported? Would they spend this level of time, commitment, energy and creativity anywhere else? Take this away, decrease the importance of music in their schools and we will lose them. Forever.
I sincerely hope that the proposed National Music Plan will fill in some of these missing details. Either way, we have to stop thinking this is all about us – fighting for our jobs, battling over politics, grumbling about each other as organisations – because it’s not. It’s about ensuring that these boys, and hundreds of thousands of other young people across the country like them, have every opportunity to feel proud of themselves through making music.
