Target practice

With dwindling numbers of people training to be music teachers in England, what can be done to encourage more interest in the music education sector?

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The UK government claims to be ‘committed to high-quality music education for every child’

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The under-recruitment of trainee secondary school music teachers in England has hit a new low. Figures published by the Department for Education (DfE) in December 2023 show that the government reached just 27 per cent of its initial teacher training target for music in the 2023–24 academic year, recruiting 216 trainees against a target of 790. The DfE has only once met its annual target for music in the past ten years, and that was in the Covid year of 2020–21.

Until now, the lowest figure reached was 64 per cent in 2022–23. In an attempt to stem the decline, the government is reintroducing a bursary for trainee secondary music teachers in 2024–25, which will be worth £10,000. While this move has been welcomed by music education experts and campaigners, they say more needs to be done to address teachers’ working conditions, the lack of teacher training provision in some areas of the country, and the undervaluing of music as an academic subject.

The current recruitment situation is a far cry from 2010–11, when the DfE’s music target of 570 was comfortably exceeded. The government then reduced the target to 390 for 2011–12; Dr Alison Daubney, an honorary senior lecturer in education at the University of Sussex and co-editor of the British Journal of Music Education, says this marked a clear shift in policy and priorities. ‘If you underrecruit, and then carry on under-recruiting by hundreds of teachers a year, it diminishes the status of the subject,’ she says. ‘And it means that the pool of teachers able to apply for jobs gets ever smaller. Every time you squeeze this pool, you also make it more exclusive, so it becomes more difficult to get people into the classroom who represent the communities they are teaching.’ With decreasing numbers of trainees and a government shift towards school-led models of teacher training, many university training courses have closed, notes Daubney. On top of this, a government ‘market review’ of initial teacher training in 2021 led to some highly rated providers losing their official accreditation. Daubney says: ‘We have black holes in the country – big geographical areas where there is little or no access to music teacher training.’

Another policy shift in 2010 was the introduction of the English Baccalaureate, a secondary school accountability measure that the Independent Society of Musicians (ISM) and other campaigning organisations have decried for marginalising music and other creative subjects. ISM chief executive Deborah Annetts says: ‘If music is being squeezed out of schools as a subject, musicians will question why they should consider training to be a music teacher. The DfE has also wanted to increase its control of how teachers teach, taking away a sense of autonomy. When you have teachers not being treated well as professionals, and you combine this with the long hours, workload pressures and the lack of funding in schools, it makes for a rather demoralising situation.’

‘We have black holes in the country – big areas where there is little or no access to music teacher training’ – Dr Alison Daubney, co-editor, British Journal of Music Education

Catherine Barker, chair of the Music Teachers Association and head of music and performing arts at schools group United Learning, says there is some cause for optimism with more teaching job opportunities opening up around the country, even though the pool of potential recruits is smaller. ‘Following the 2022 publication of the refreshed National Plan for Music Education and the increased focus from Ofsted [the national schools inspectorate] on the importance of breadth of curriculum, schools are looking to address their music provision,’ she says. ‘So schools that, for example, have only a limited amount of music every year in a carousel programme rather than a full weekly provision, are seeking to address this. And this means that schools are recruiting.’ Daubney sees undergraduate music courses as increasingly doing more to prepare students for teaching as a part of what they will realistically go on to do, and notes that classroom teaching is also something professional musicians can come to later in life. There is flexibility, too, in the training routes for secondary school music teachers, says Barker: ‘Doing a university-based postgraduate certificate in education isn’t the only route into classroom teaching. There are school-centred initial teacher training courses and there are also salaried training positions.’

The reintroduction of the training bursary for music should address some of the financial concerns of young graduates who are coming off the back of a four-year performance degree, as well as experienced musicians considering a career change. But how much is teacher pay, frequently seen as sector-wide retention issue, a factor for those musicians? Barker says: ‘If freelance musicians move into the classroom and stay there, they are a lot more financially secure than they would be working in the music industry. Teaching is a profession with genuine progression possibilities.’

A DfE spokesperson says: ‘We remain committed to high-quality music education for every child, which is why the government now expects schools to teach music for at least an hour a week from ages 5 to 14, give pupils opportunities to sing and play an instrument, and establish choirs and ensembles. We have introduced a range of initiatives to boost recruitment in key subjects, including introducing a bursary for music teachers. There are now record numbers of teachers in our schools, up by 27,000 or six per cent since 2010.’

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