It was depressing but not surprising to hear that a state-funded school, Bingley Grammar in Yorkshire, plans to charge pupils £5 a week to study music GCSE.
Is this the thin end of the wedge? As the ISM and Bacc for the Future campaign's Deborah Annetts pointed out, schools’ budgets are under pressure, and performance measures like the EBacc certainly do not encourage schools to support creative subjects. The wedge was hammered in some time ago with their exclusion from the so-called ‘core’ of ‘academic’ subjects.
Last month Rufus Norris, artistic director of the National Theatre, asked in reference to the EBacc: ‘Why is the government pursuing creative education policies that actually exacerbate inequality of opportunity?’ The creative industries are an economic success story, he argued, so why would a government supposedly committed to a ‘society that works for everyone’ be pursuing policies that perpetuate the myth ‘that culture and creativity belong naturally to the elite’?
A lot has been written about the EBacc, and it is important not to conflate music's importance (or not) to schools' performance in league tables, which is one issue, and that of charging for off-timetable provision of GCSE music. The school's head teacher, Luke Weston, told the BBC that the ‘nominal’ charge was ‘nothing to do with funding, it's really allowing our kids to have an extra GCSE at a time that suits them’, adding that the school was picking up ‘99.9%’ of the cost of music lessons. The numbers of pupils taking music has also since increased, he said.
It is up to schools' leadership teams to decide how they are run, of course, and doubtless Bingley's pupils are packing a lot in. No doubt too their curriculum is broad and balanced. But pursuing instrumental lessons is already costly. Weston may believe the charge to be nominal and he is in the best position to judge for his school; but were this to become the norm across the country it would, absolutely, be catastrophic for music education in England.
And this, in turn, would be catastrophic for our children and young people, and so it comes full circle. New education secretary Damian Hinds wrote last month that ‘this government wants a Britain that works for everybody, not just the privileged few’. Yet his department's policies act conclusively against broad participation in one of the most successful, genuinely world-leading parts of our economy. It must be time to reconsider.
