A story of pure music-educational inspiration today – and not an El Sistema in sight. At MusicLearningLive!, the national festival of musical education at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, Abbott Community Primary School kicked off the whole event with half an hour of singing. Nothing unusual about that: except this wasn't a crack children's choir from a music specialist school, but the entire school, from year 3 to year 6. The teachers were only there as bystanders, as the kids led each other in classroom and playground songs about everything from where to put decimal points in fractions, how to parse words into syllables and how to do your times tables, to an ironic ditty about SATs ("SATs'll drive us nuts in May/5-4-3-2-1 we jest/Who's afraid of a little ol' test?").
Abbott Community is a "Singing School", part of a programme that puts singing at the heart of every class, and in which music isn't just something that's done for an hour a week, but is a route to learning in every subject area. It's a scheme that pre-dates the government's Sing Up! programme, which aims to have every child in primary education singing by 2012, by five years or so. Singing Schools has been taken up by hundreds of schools up and down the country, and Abbott Community's performance was proof of how you can make music part of every child's school experience, how it can improve self-confidence, learning, social cohesion – and teach them something about musical techniques and styles as well.
All this matters because of a couple of recent reports – one from Ofsted, the other an independent Cambridge review – which say that because of the government's obsession with targets, exams, and with numeracy and literacy, the arts and humanities (and music in particular) are suffering. All this in spite of every school's statutory requirement to make music part of the national curriculum until the age of 14. The irony is that in schools where a broader curriculum is adopted, and in which kids do have regular, meaningful participation in music, numeracy and literacy are shown to improve, along with all the other social benefits that music brings.
This isn't a new idea: we've known for decades that music has these positive effects, but no government has ever actually put it into practice. In a panel discussion I recorded as part of MusicLearningLive! for Music Matters on Radio 3 tomorrow, there was frustration from key thinkers and policy-makers that we're still having the same arguments, decade after decade; that there's so little provision for helping teachers to bring music into the classroom in the teacher-training qualification, the PGCE; that it's still largely a postcode lottery whether you will have real musical opportunities as a schoolchild (if your headteacher isn't interested and your class teacher isn't confident, it's just not going to happen); and there was a creeping pessimism that the money will dry up after 2011, the end of the government's £332m windfall, announced at the end of 2007.
So far, so bad: but there's hope, too. If six-year-old kids, like those at Abbott Community Primary, can organise themselves into a singing group, all our present generation of administrators, teachers and promoters have to do is harness the same energy and make sure that every child in the country has the chance to participate in music-making. Simple, really. It might be doomed optimism, but I hope that MusicLearningLive! really will be a catalyst for putting music at the heart of every child's school experience.