As Expo is busy celebrating the very best of music education, things are not looking so good on the other side of London. Newham council's radical ‘Every Child’ (EC) programme is set to be cut amid budget cuts and accusations of financial mismanagement in certain divisions of the council. If you're not aware, the EC programme has been running since 2010, providing theatre trips, chess classes, music lessons and sports to children throughout the borough. Roughly 90% of its £2.5m annual budget goes towards the music strand, which includes providing every Year 6 child with an instrument.
When launching EC, the previous mayor of Newham Robin Wales said: ‘The middle classes do it for their kids. Why shouldn't we do it for all our kids?’ Having heard the borough's current mayor, Rokhsana Fiaz, speak passionately about EC at Music Mark's Summer Summit in 2018, it would be a shame for her council to cut it so readily.
The council's official line is that the programme isn't having the same ‘huge impact [on] children's learning’ as its programme for providing a hot lunch for every child in the borough. If you're going to compare music, as wonderful as it is, to basic nutritional needs then it will always come up short – such a comparison is deeply unfair and pits the two programmes into needless opposition. It is a distraction tactic and nothing more.
Perhaps savings can be found within the programme – and I wouldn't shy away from exploring that possibility – but this all-or-nothing approach to ECaM will have a devastating impact on the borough and beyond. There is a growing list of prominent musicians who have backed calls for a similar scheme to be trialled nationally and its failure in Newham could stop the idea in its tracks. The Musicians’ Union's general secretary Horace Trubridge sums it up best: ‘The real losers in this scenario are the very people that Newham council [claims it wants] to help – namely the kids from poorer backgrounds.’
The kids of Newham are the kids of Salford are the kids of Glasgow are the kids of Wrexham. They deserve, and should expect, nourishment of their bodies and their minds.
