This year's first governmental announcement on music education arrived on 3 January via the Department of Education, heralding £80m for music hubs for a one-year period across 2020-21. (This is for England only; education is a devolved policy area in the rest of the UK.) The news appeared to be a confirmation of funding that was first disclosed in November (see editorial and news, MT December 2019).
Debates around what this money is and isn't for – and the effectiveness of the policy underpinning it – have been much covered in these pages. This time, however, a new remark stood out. In a Classic FM news item about the funding, schools minister Nick Gibb said: ‘We want all children to be leaving school able to read and write music.’
This is an interesting metric to propose as a marker of success in music education. Most would agree that notational literacy is needed for some types of ensemble playing, not to mention the great canon of western art music, but there's so much other music-making where notation plays a lesser or different role. Take rock and pop, where performers might legitimately have a range of relationships to notation, from close to distant; and gamelan, as featured in January's MT, which, like so much music from around the world, is an aural tradition.
Even if we were to accept that all children should leave school reading music, how would this be measured? Is identifying a middle C sufficient, or should young people be able to sight-sing a madrigal? This quandary reveals an assumed parallel with language literacy levels, where children are graded according to age-based averages. But notational literacy serves different purposes and doesn't necessarily fit with ideas of age-based competency. Further, what is meant by music writing – composing or dictation?
In the same news item, the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, commented that the funding was ‘not sufficient to address the impact of a decade of austerity’. A reasonable point – but what a great opportunity there now is for opposition MPs to expose the weaknesses of the government's music education policy in a more detailed way.
