What exactly is the government playing at?

One day, it re-announces a fistful of dollars (and that, in overall public spending terms, is what £332 million over the next three years – or is it four? – amounts to) for an assortment of musical activities in schools. Perhaps it has calculated that recycling its existing commitments, plus an extra £12 million a year of small change, is the minimum it can do to keep on board a loose coalition of the enthusiastic, the uncritical, the dependent and the congenitally well-disposed, to catch a few celebrities, and to stop the Warbling Mogul and Manifesto Panjandrum resigning in a huff. Who knows? – it may be right.

The next, it announces that as part of its newly-revealed Ten-Year Children’s Plan there will be a ‘root and branch review’ of the primary curriculum by Sir Jim Rose, ‘to reduce set subjects and to concentrate more on the three Rs’. This, the press reports, will mean a process of ‘de-clutter’: The Times talks of ‘de-cluttering the curriculum, which may mean … art and music combined into a creative arts class’. Ministers have said they want to take out ‘some of the clutter’ from the timetable. All so that primary pupils can learn Urdu and Mandarin.

So that’s it, then. Music as an independent subject in primary schools is ‘clutter’. The ISM has been warning for years that music was in danger of ending up as part of a general arts curriculum. Music on its own? Too hard; too expensive; can’t get the wood, you know… And lo, it is coming to pass. Furthermore, what happens in primary schools today will seep into secondary schools tomorrow. We shall soon be hearing about the unbridgeable gap in music teaching between primary and secondary levels, and how the only way to deal with that is to make secondary music less rarefied, complex and challenging.

We are not persuaded by the undertaking in the Children’s Plan that ‘all children, no matter where they live or their background, will have opportunities to get involved in high quality cultural activities in and out of school’. It depends what you mean by ‘high quality’ and by ‘cultural’. Nor do we find convincing the promise that ‘50 new state-of-the-art youth centres … or 500 refurbished, or 2,000 smaller scale centres or mobile units’ will ‘contain a range of positive activities for young people including sport, music, drama, art facilities etc’. It depends what you mean by ‘positive’ and by ‘activities’.

We also note with dismay that the money which has just been announced is not protected against inflation. But even if it were, and there were more, it wouldn’t be the answer. It ain’t what you spend, it’s the way that you spend it. Cash has been sprayed at ‘education, education, education’ in vast quantities for years – annual spending has risen from £29 billion in 1997 to £77.4 billion in 2007. This money does not come from some intergalactic source. It comes from taxpayers’ pockets. Yet Britain has slid down the international league tables, according to a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development. In six years, our 15-year-olds have gone from 8th to 24th in maths, 7th to 17th in reading and 4th to 14th in science. Is this lamentable outcome the result of exposure in primary school to the ‘clutter’ of class music lessons? Or are we now on the way to creating a generation of immusicates, to join the illiterates and the innumerates?

There are many who counsel silence, or a non-negative response, in case criticism invites retribution from the powers that be. But fear of consequences has never been a reliable guide to policy. Difficult times lie ahead for real music education, and it does no good to pretend otherwise.

A very happy 2008 to one and all!

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