School music lessons are no longer popular. So says the Royal Society of Arts, which this week published a report into the state of arts teaching in schools. In a study that lasted three years, 63% of leavers indicated that they had learned very little from their school music lessons; music is unpopular at GCSE level, with ‘pupil enjoyment, relevance, skill deployment and expressive dimensions often absent’. The report states the need to tackle the quality of teaching in the subject and urges that new training for music teachers be considered under the watchful eye of the best teachers from other schools.

This is quite damning, but are we really surprised? How many times does music in the curriculum suffer because of inadequate timetabling? Let’s face it, music gives a school a high profile when it suits, but at other times, it remains an unimportant subject and is awarded little in the way of money or time, and the poor teacher, sometimes the only one in the school, becomes isolated in an environment that is technology-crazed and sports mad!

The report claims that pupils see music in secondary schools as increasingly specialist, exclusive, technical and dull and that this is directly opposite from its perception in the primary school classroom. Good! It’s about time that we begin to realise what the study of music really entails – it is difficult and elitist, and its pursuit can be mind-bendingly boring. Music is about the only multi-disciplinary subject on the curriculum and with the fun comes a large amount of hard and often gruelling work. Making music requires a skill that, on the face of it, many of the whinging youths who were the basis of the report will never have. So why try to feed it to them in the first place? The time has come when we have to say enough is enough – we can be enthusiastic about our subject but it is about time for us to stop being National Curriculum-music-for-all apparatchiks and start explaining to our pupils exactly what the subject entails. Music is fun in the primary classroom, but what isn’t? We easily forget that teaching adolescents requires a substantially different approach to teaching small children: there are real skills to be learned, deadlines to work to and a natural reluctance on the part of the pupil to find learning exciting; secondary pupils find self-expression difficult, they don’t like to sing and they certainly shy away from anything that requires an emotional input. So perhaps before damning the level of music teaching in schools and calling for more pop music to be taught, the RSA might look at a few overriding factors. Forget the fads, there’s work to be done.

Other ‘good’ news for school music making comes in the guise of the extra £10m funds committed by the government for providing school instruments; but before you all run around looking for instrumentalists amongst this year’s new intake, you had better also know that in the next few months, a planned directive will require all teachers, including peripatetic music staff, to have a PGCE qualification. Things seem all right as far as unqualified classroom teachers are concerned, since they can take fast-track certification and become bona fide teachers (whatever they are) within three months. But what of the country’s vast army of peripatetic music teachers? A quick poll suggests that only around thirty per cent of them hold any form of teaching qualification and requiring them to become qualified will probably result in their going and doing something else. The numbers of private teachers might increase substantially, but this will be inversely proportional to the number of pupils learning at school. Since one of the beauties of the peripatetic system is that it provides inexpensive tuition for those who cannot afford a private tutor, music is again going to become something that only certain sectors of society can pursue. So, getting back to the Royal Society of Arts report, we might not have to worry anyway since there won’t be anyone left to encourage!

John Woodford