Music teacher professionalism and its enemies

You will take it as read that you are a professional, that you act professionally and belong to a profession with a history, indeed, a very long and distinguished history. You will take it as given that as a professional you have some, if not considerable standing in society, and that what you do is something done with integrity, offering a degree of prestige and a certain amount of honour. Furthermore there is commitment to a vocation. There is something that impels you to be who you are as a musician and music educator. In this you act as a custodian of what you and a wider community of musicians and music educators know and value. And therefore you have expertise, authority and the right to communicate to others what is known and valued. This expertise is respected and therefore you have autonomy over the professional decisions you make and the ways in which you forge relationships with those you teach and inspire.

This picture of the music teacher as professional, working with freedom and integrity is one I think we would want to hold on to. Of course there will be matters of professional arrogance and incompetence that from time to time bring into question the degree of autonomy deserving to the professional, and there must be professional standards that are continually renewed and maintained. And yes, the music teacher is accountable for the flourishing of musical and cultural life in society, and of course, they must be accountable to those they teach. However, during the past 25 years the idea of professional autonomy, as well as the forms of accountability that have traditionally provided for trust in the professional, have been significantly re-ordered by government. Here I am thinking in particular of the school music teachers and the ways in which their professionalism has been eroded to the point where their integrity and capacity to act authentically is threatened. How did this come about?

The quest for continuity

The story begins with a common desire in the 1980s to make a National Curriculum. The desire amongst music educators was strong. The desire amongst politicians was equally strong. For music educators it would be a way of bringing together, a way of sifting and sorting the many innovations of the 1960s and 70s, a way of reconsidering what a balanced music curriculum might be like and how continuity and progression might be best achieved. It offered a way of unifying the profession. We note that the quest for continuity, progression and unity of purpose had been voiced in the Memorandum on the Teaching of Music (University of London Press) drawn up by the Music Panel of the Association of Assistant Mistresses in 1935. The report concludes:

‘It cannot be emphasised too strongly how greatly it would be to the advantage of all musical education if there could be more systematic co-operation between those who teach in Elementary Schools, Secondary Schools, and Training Colleges’. [1]

Just as this made good sense in 1935 so it did fifty years later. However, the Education Reform Act of 1988 set in train far more than a common curriculum; for its political impetus came from two strands of ‘new right’ thinking: the neo-conservative strand concerned with cultural restoration and a return to traditional values, and the neo-liberal strand concerned to promote free market values. The former in fact made relatively little impact while the latter in due course gave rise to the deployment of bureaucratic structures and managerial strategies seeking efficiency, and promoting new forms of accountability. Thus emerged the growth of ‘high stakes’ assessment, inspection frameworks and official definitions of effective music teaching. What may have started as ‘new right’ political ideology had become New Labour orthodoxy.

Erosion of trust

In all this the work of the music teacher had been regulated in new ways, their professional knowledge and judgement doubted, their professional autonomy circumscribed and their authority thrown into question. Amidst the emerging culture of suspicion begetting fear and uncertainty comes the erosion of trust in professional judgement. There is a downward spiralling and trusting becomes risky. Openness and transparency, truthfulness and integrity are endangered; for now the music teacher must learn to ‘perform’. But this is not a musical performance. Instead, there is doing what will impress, what will please, what will meet the imposed criteria and what will indicate competence. In this there is a tendency towards fabrication and what Cambridge philosopher Onora O’Neil calls ‘licence to deceive’.[2] And now, while new forms of professionalism will be noted, commented upon and used as exemplars in the promotion of new professional identities, the personal integrity of the music teacher is compromised.

How to teach an ‘outstanding lesson’, a ‘never fail lesson’, how to ‘match high quality inputs with high quality outputs’, how to ‘deliver’ a curriculum that will ‘meet clients’ needs’ and ‘personalise’ and ‘customise’ learning is the language of managerialism and the market. It is this that now defines what it is to be professional. This is not the language of music or of education. It is however the discourse that music teachers in our schools now live with and must come to speak, for they now work within the concept of ‘performance management’ where performance targets are to be met and through which recognition is to be gained. But this may have little to do with the exercising of professional judgement, musical teaching or the making of musically fluent young people. More significantly, it means that being ‘good’ at what a teacher does is likely to be not ‘good enough’. I give an example which is not entirely fictitious.

How now does a secondary school music teacher respond to a detailed specialist Ofsted inspection of his department and its work when the judgement reached is ‘good’?  The music teacher’s headteacher receives this news as ‘not good enough’. The teacher’s work will need to become ‘outstanding’. What if the teacher, after much soul-searching decides that he knows he is good at what he does, and that there is ample evidence of this? Why would he want to be ‘outstanding’? What if the teacher renewed his efforts to clarify his vision for his school and its music, unwilling to become a compliant agent in all this? What if this teacher carried on caring for his students and their music with personal integrity intact? There would be a risk. The teacher might now be viewed as being less able to contribute to the policy making of the school than in the past. The risk would be to become mis-recognised. His gain would be personal integrity and authenticity. 

Better forms of accountability

The integrity and professionalism of a music teacher depends upon conviction and loyalty to values learnt and embodied in the process of their own musical education where inspiration was found in the practice of their music teachers and from where a sense of vocation was found. The idea of vocation sits uncomfortably with all that is bureaucratic and managerial and the emergent forms of professionalism defined in neo-liberal terms. These have no interest in what is at the heart of a music teachers’ professional identity and personal integrity; for the personal integrity of the music teacher ultimately lies within the quality of the teacher-pupil relationship and their burgeoning relationship with what is being learnt. When this relationship becomes impaired by the undue interference of external agencies acting out of mis-trust, it becomes more difficult for the teacher to trust their own judgments about the decisions they make. Doubts emerge about how they should be teaching, what they should be teaching and why? Above all else they are likely to feel uneasy about the way their teaching can be reduced to a set of descriptors defined as ‘satisfactory’ or ‘outstanding’.

I suspect that music teachers will read with dismay the recent Ofsted document ‘Making more of music: Improving the quality of music teaching in secondary schools’.[3] The document tells how teaching can move from ‘satisfactory’ to ‘outstanding’. Of course, music teachers are unlikely to read it at all. The reality is that many have long rejected this approach and become impervious to its methods. Telling professionals what they should be doing, prescribing how they should teach and how they can become an outstanding teacher is a failed strategy because it is contingent upon the perpetual auditing of their activity and the scrutiny and surveillance of their practices. So, we must find much better forms of accountability. The present regime would appear to be not only costly but in large part counterproductive. The system of ‘assuring quality’ as it currently stands lies exhausted by its own ineptitude and inefficiency.

It would seem that music teachers have great resilience in remaining true to their calling as well as a capacity for quiet resistance as they seek to maintain integrity and a sense of professionalism. In this music teachers need only to be reminded that they are the chief custodians of what is valuable and what is worth transmitting, that they have expertise at doing this, and that ultimately their professionalism will be best evidenced in the quality of their musical relationships with those they teach.

John Finney MA CertEd LMusTCL is a senior lecturer in music education at Cambridge University.

[1]  A. A. M.  (1935) Memorandum on the Teaching of Music. London: University of London Press.

[2]   A Question of Trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[3]  Ofsted (2009) Making more of music: Improving the quality of music teaching in secondary schools. Ofsted.

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