The Music Education Podcast
Listen for authentic and challenging conversation on all things music ed. Brought to you by Charanga. Hosted and produced by Chris Woods of The Chris Woods Groove Orchestra.
The Music Education Podcast
Episode 38: Deborah Annetts - Music: A subject in peril?
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In this episode Chris chats to deboarh Annetts Chief Exec of the ISM about their report Music: A subject in peril?
Welcome to the Music Education Podcast. I'm Chris of the Chris Woods Groove Orchestra, and this podcast is brought to you by the Soundstorm Music Education Hub. In this episode, I chat with Deborah Annette, the chief executive of ISM, and we delve into the ISM's rather eye-opening report. Hearing about what the ISM does and what was found in the report itself is fantastically valuable to hear. But as the conversation goes on, Deborah reveals some really fascinating and quite inspiring stats and pieces of information.
SPEAKER_01GDP for the creative industries is £116 billion per annum. It is the same as the financial sector or the construction sector.
SPEAKER_00Wow, so people strumming on guitars and your Wall Street types, they're literally the same.
SPEAKER_01They are the same.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's wonderful. The conversation also looks at musical culture as a whole and asks if people are just starting to devalue music even more. I asked Deborah for her prediction of the next five years within music and music education. And her answer to that question, I think, is well worth listening to. I hope you enjoy. Deborah, thank you so much for joining me today. Can we start off with a bit of a who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Chris, for asking me along. It's lovely to be with you on this very sunny April afternoon. Really lovely weather looking outside of my window. Um, and I'm here really to talk about the ISM's latest report, Music a Subject Imperable. Well, but in terms of a bit about me, I am sufficiently old to have been through a really good music education at my local state school. So I had free music lessons. I sang in various choirs that won various festivals, and all of it was free, and it was absolutely fabulous. I didn't go into a career in music at all. I trained to become a lawyer, which I did for a number of years. I practiced in the private sector, largely working in the fields of discrimination and employment law. So I worked both for employers but also for employees who had been very badly treated. And I guess that is what drew me to the ISM after I kind of switched careers and became a chief exec in the not-for-profit sector because I was very, very aware as to how tough the life of a musician is. It's really, really tough. Um, very often they're not employed, they're freelance, uh, they get buggered about all the time, they don't have contractual certainty, they often don't get paid, nobody respects their intellectual property rights. It's pretty rubbish, and yet still they do it. It's absolutely extraordinary. And when I went to the ISM, I was aware of this extraordinary community of musicians, and it's been going since 1882, so it's an incredibly old organization. Um, but what it was set up to do is still totally relevant, which I find very interesting. It was set up to support the music profession, still incredibly important, and to promote the art of music, and that's where music education comes in. Still incredibly important. So I've been at the ISM for a very long time now, and it continues to be incredibly challenging and demanding, but I love every second of it.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic. So that's so that ISM is uh well, it's not quite a union, right? It's there, it's a body to or is it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, it's a professional association, it's how it was set up back in 1882. Uh, so many of the uh elements of what it does, like uh looking after individuals who are in trouble because of what's happened to them in their place of work, are the kinds of things that you'd find in trade unions. Uh, but because we're not a trade union, we can't call our members out on strike. Um, but we do do a huge amount of campaigning. And my view is, and this is possibly me just being a bit, you know, kind of arrogant, I think our campaigning is second to none. And because we are utterly independent, we do not take a penny from the government or from the arts council. We are able to look at everything which is going on and call it out if it's not right. And our members, and indeed people from outside the membership, write to us and say, What about this? What about that? And the membership has now, when I started, it was four and a half thousand and it's now over eleven thousand, um, which is extraordinary levels of growth, which does keep me up at night worrying about how we're going to look after everybody because that's incredibly important. Um, and our mantra, we have a mantra, is jobs and money. That's what we think really matters more than anything else.
SPEAKER_00Cool. Okay, thank you. That's a that's a lovely summary of what the ISM is, I think. Let's get stuck in to this um report. What is it?
SPEAKER_01Well, okay, so um way, way, way, way, way, way back. Um, so more than 10 years ago, when the Conservative Party came into power, so long time ago, over 10 years, um, one of the first things they did was set up the Henley Review to have a look at the provision of music education. Um, and they found basically that there was a postcode lottery in relation to music education across England. And we have to remember this is England because education is a devolved uh uh subject area. So um the government said, Well, we're going to sort all this out and we're going to set up something called music education hubs, and it's all going to be fantastic. And that was all set out in the first national plan for music education. At the same time as the government did that, they introduced accountability measures, and in particular, something called the e-back. And we set up a campaign called Back for the Future, which basically said, we think accountability measures, as structured, are going to have a really bad impact on creative subjects in our schools. And we campaigned long and hard on that, and over 200 organisations joined us in that campaign, all kinds of organizations: theatre, design, craft, etc., because we could all see how dangerous the eBAC was going to be for creative subjects in our schools. And government was absolutely resistant to any change whatsoever. Um, so 10 years on uh got to the point when the national plan was supposed to be refreshed. So that was more or less the start of the pandemic when the consultation came out in February 2020. And by that time, we'd produced quite a lot of reports. So we produce one with something called the All-Party Parliamentary Group, and we provide the secretariat to that uh APPG for music education. And we produced a report with them in 2019, which showed the shocking impact of accountability measures on music education in the state sector. Those measures don't uh affect the independent sector in the same way. So um we knew things were bad from 2019, and when the 2020 consultation came out around the national plan, um, we were absolutely uh convinced that this was an opportunity to get the government to have a really good think about music education and what was going on, and we put in a very long and detailed submission. We were pleased because the press that came out from the government in February 2020 said that this was an opportunity to promote equal music opportunities, and we thought, wow, perhaps we're actually going to get somewhere, given what we've been talking about in terms of accountability measures. But as the months went on, um the remit became more and more murky, so it wasn't entirely clear what the remit was going to be in terms of putting the national plan for music education, the for refreshed version together. Um, and there was also a kind of murkiness around consultation. So there was a call for evidence, and the government said that uh the workforce would be consulted in relation to changes to the national plan. But that doesn't seem to have happened. And in my various letters backwards and forwards with the Department for Education, it doesn't look as if that is going to be happening. Um, I'm not sure what the mechanism is that they have decided to follow. Uh, ISM is certainly not part of the expert panel that was set up, so I've got no idea what's in the refresh plan. Um, so I don't know if it is going to meet the objective of promoting equal music opportunities. I have absolutely no idea. But what I do know, what has become clear, is that this plan is not going to be looking at funding or accountability measures. And that is something that really troubled us. Because it did feel a bit like we're going to tinker around over here. Let's not do anything that fundamental that is going to change what's happening in our schools.
SPEAKER_00So it's more of a list of recommend or suggestions, if you like, like a No, I don't think it's that.
SPEAKER_01I think it's that it's too, I don't know, challenging possibly, too difficult to reform the accountability measures, which the government seems to be incredibly wedded to. And funding, if you look what's happening to funding, and there's lots of stats out there on that, it's not just music education, but education generally has suffered quite a hit in terms of the level of funding over the past few years. Um and I think there is a reluctance to address funding issues in our education system. So it's not just music, it's right across the piece, but I think music and all non-EBAC subjects have been disproportionately affected. So we were very keen to make sure that the teacher's voice was heard in all of this. Um because that's what we do. We want to make sure that um government hears what music teachers have got to say, particularly if they're not going to do a full consultation on the refreshed plan. So my colleagues and myself, we sat down back end of last year. We worked really hard because we always do when we're doing um research work on the questions to make sure that they are absolutely what needs to be investigated. And then we sent it out. And you've got no idea when you send out one of these surveys, whether everybody's going to say, Oh my god, not another survey, and stick it straight in the bin, which is entirely possible, or they go, Oh, fantastic, I really want to spend time answering that. I have no idea.
SPEAKER_00Who do you send these surveys out to if they let me ask you who they are?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely across the whole of the sector. So it's not ISM members because our object is much broader than that if you go back to 1882. Um, and that's a really important point. We are there for the sector, we're not just there for our members.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01So we sent it out on social media, lots and lots of social media. We sent it out via trade unions, the big teaching unions, we sent it out um across Facebook groups, you name it, we sent it out all over the place.
SPEAKER_00And what are the big questions that you're asking?
SPEAKER_01Well, we were asking people like whether they would like to be consulted. Which isn't a tough question. One of the thing that really surprised me is when we got the answers back to that question, it was not a hundred percent. It was 99.5%.
SPEAKER_00I can just I I could just imagine a lot of teacher responses being, would I like to I haven't got time to be consulted?
SPEAKER_01I haven't 89.5% of them thought they would like to be consulted, but we were we were quite surprised about the 0.5%. Okay. So that was one of the things we were looked looking at. We also asked questions around funding, because funding is something that we know is a real issue, and the stuff that came back is just heartbreaking.
SPEAKER_00So you're you're asking a particular teacher what is the funding situation actually.
SPEAKER_01Yes, what is your funding situation like? Yeah. And and not surprisingly, the independent teachers all said it's absolutely fantastic, and we get pots and pots of money. And the teachers from maintain schools said, not so good. And one of them said, I get one pound per pupil per annum.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_01And I don't think you can do a lot with that. You can probably buy a two, a two B pencil, can't you? And then that's it, that's your budget spent. So lots of heartbreaking stuff there. Some of it was really bad. Um, music teachers having to mend the instruments and fund all the cost of mending the instruments. Other music teachers saying that they fundraise for their departments to make the money go further, which is great. But one of them said, and now that money is basically taken by the school. So they're doing their fundraising and it gets basically what's the word, nicked.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think is the word there, isn't it? That we're looking for. I mean, it's it's I I'm laughing, um, which is terrible, but I think it's because I hear these stories so often doing this that it's just it's just so unsurprising, you know.
SPEAKER_01It's sort of uh Well, I guess we were surprised at just how bad things were. I mean, we knew things were really bad in relation to the accountability measures because of the research which has done been done by the University of Sussex. But I don't think we had any appreciation as to the um huge issues around funding. And and that is the thing that really, I guess, goes to the heart of the government's commitment. If they are truly going to be about promoting equal music opportunities, then you have to look at the funding. You can't you can't say that without also looking at the funding. And that's that's the thing that I have been saying, and many others in the sector have been saying to government, you've got to look at it because it is dire. And there is this massive inequality now between the independent schools, uh, where there is still very good provision in relation to the arts, because the private sector recognises its value, um, but the level of provision within the maintained sector and the academy schools is much less good. So, what does that mean in terms of diversity for the music sector and indeed the other parts of the creative industries in say 10 years' time? I think there are massive issues around diversity uh already in existence, but I think it's going to get much, much worse because of the funding challenges. So that was one area that came back very strongly. The other area, I guess, was the accountability measures, and it just reinforced all the research from the University of Sussex from 2019. So everything that we have learnt about Progress 8 and the EBAC basically squeezing out non-EBAC subjects and in particular the creative subjects. And if a subject is seen to be uh less attractive because it's not part of the uh accountability measures mechanism, then it will be squeezed from the timetable. You won't get so many teachers in that particular discipline, the funding will be cut, etc. So the accountability measures kind of drive the choices which are being made in the state sector. Um, so there it's all kind of wrapped up together, those issues. And there are ways that these accountability measures are not set in stone. I mean, they didn't exist back in 2008, they came out of, I think, the head of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. So they can always be looked at again, they're not set in stone. If you want accountability measures, well then have a look at Progress 8 and see if it could become a Progress 5, for instance. So you free up some of the choices that children can make at school. And I think that's the other thing. It's such a tight, it's it's such a straitjacket for children, you know, they've got to choose from this particular group of subjects whether they like them or not. And they might actually want to do design or music, and they're being pushed in a totally different direction, which is just not good. I mean, I certainly at my school, which was it was an old-fashioned state grammar school, but I still did music. You know? And I don't see why children of today don't get the choices that I had.
SPEAKER_00It's pretty wild, isn't it? It fit it feels like um it feels like sometimes all these conversations we're we've been having on this podcast about different wonderful ways of teaching and inspiring children is pretty pretty futile, really, if there's no opportunity to sort of deliver it, isn't there? Is that I mean you you mentioned the type of subjects that are getting squeezed out, but you said in particular the creative subjects. So, for example, um a physical education, sports, education, sports sciences, that kind of area, is that something that isn't getting squeezed out as much? Are you, you know, is it is it is it really that unique? Because I often feel well, like with so many things in modern times, isn't it? Is it just the people who are shouting loudest, you know, but actually is it a case of everything other than the eBAC is is just getting pushed away?
SPEAKER_01I think sports has a slightly different structure, and I don't think they're um suffering as badly as the creative subjects. I mean, although music is suffering very badly and A-level music has virtually disappeared altogether, likewise B Tech, um design and technology is far worse. Really? Yeah. Wow. I think there's some I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think it's something like a 50% fall. And that is extraordinary given that it drives so much of our economy. Yeah. I honestly can't remember this precise stat, but I'm pretty sure they're at the top of the of our little table of who's doing worse.
SPEAKER_00I mean that that that's real uh changed my complete perspective on that. Because I think I I often come to these conversations with the the thought in my head of basically schools are becoming less relevant in the sense of we know children are accessing music more than ever outside of school. Um so actually, maybe just school isn't doing it right. But does the things like does that No, I don't think it's no, I don't think it's that.
SPEAKER_01I'm just gonna have a ferret to see if I can find my last speech, which may actually have those stats in it.
SPEAKER_00That's good. I I I like to keep a record of all my speeches as well, Deborah, to hand, just in case.
SPEAKER_01Well, you see, you can see how much of a uh an old-fashioned person I am because I like my paper. So here we go. Okay, here we go. The fall in arts uptake at GCSE from 2014 to 2021 is as follows Design and technology 59%. Wow.
unknownWow.
SPEAKER_01Music 17%, drama 21%. So that gives you a kind of snapshot of what's going on and And obviously, we're not the people speaking for designing technology, but I do find that personally very strange. And there's another organisation that we work with quite a lot called the Edge Foundation, which is really focused on technology in particular. And they were set up by the Secretary of State for Education, who was in Margaret Thatcher's government, and his name has just gone out of my head. I'm sure it will return. But he is perpetually talking about the importance of technology and how we need to get technology back into our schools, and we really need to understand the importance of the creative subjects because we're just not building for the fourth industrial revolution. And I think that's the problem. The EBAC, if you look at it, um, is almost like the secondary school education offer from about 1904. That was a good year. That was a good year. It was a very good year, but the EBAC, as it's currently structured, is more narrow.
SPEAKER_00Wow. So just slightly more conservative than it was things were in 1911.
SPEAKER_01And I think that's a bit of a problem for our future as a country. We should really be facing forward and thinking about things like um AI and where are the jobs going to go if everything has been digitalized and the importance of creativity in terms of generating problem-solving workers, etc., as you problem solve brilliantly, trying to assist me in setting up for the start of this podcast, you know? Fantastic. And that's because you're a musician, so you know how to problem solve and be creative. Um, but I think there is a real problem about being so, in my view, backward looking around what we are teaching our children because they're not going to be ready for this century.
SPEAKER_00Hmm. Wow. I feel like we could just stop the podcast there, but we've we've got too much time and opportunity to say more golden things. Um let's let's delve into the the actual report a little bit more, then shall we? Because there's there's some wonderful um little nuggets in the well in the recommendations, even just sort of of what after working through the report you sort of put as the suggestions of what needs to happen to change. Could you talk about those a little bit, maybe?
SPEAKER_01Well, if we just look at what the teachers told us, right? Okay, cool, cool. The ISM is very much driven by the voice of the musician or the music teacher or whatever it is, and I think that's really important. So it's not the staff team sitting on high pontificating. We very much take our lead from what people are telling us. So what they said in the responses was they want uh obviously better funding and they want it to be ring-fenced, and that's really important so that they don't lose their funding, which is often something that happens in the school setting.
SPEAKER_00Well, sort of re-ring fenced so I know that next year I I can plan ahead, basically.
SPEAKER_01That's right. That it's not going to get uh attributed to a different part of the school, so end up in modern languages, say, and that does happen. So you think you've got this and then it goes down and it ends up in chemistry or something. So they want their funding re-fen uh ring-fenced, which is absolutely right. They want music to be given a higher profile and valued, which is something we hear all the time, across the whole of the music community, actually. It's a really common theme that musicians do not feel valued. Um, whether they're performing, composing, songwriting, or in the classroom, it's something which is universal. So I would totally agree with that. Um, they want the plan to be realistic, which is right. Um, there's a lot of talk about partnerships, and wouldn't partnerships be brilliant? But partnerships need to be real to have any kind of effect rather than just window dressing. They wanted the plan to be more diverse and more accessible, which I think is right. Um, and they want the accountability measures to be addressed, which is what we've been talking about. They want the workforce to be supported, and that's a really important point because um we do a huge amount of work um on behalf of our members in relation to their legal issues, and we get through about 2,000 legal cases a year, which is a huge number. And an awful lot of them, unfortunately, come from the teacher community, um, and a lot of them relate to um poor terms and conditions. So you see that with peripatetic teachers on zero-hour contracts, on the rates of pay not increasing or going down, all kinds of stuff going on, people being removed from the um pension scheme for teachers. Um, so there's all kinds of things that are happening within the music teaching profession, which makes it very difficult for them to really just keep a roof over their head. And if you can't, particularly with the cost of living crisis, cover your your bare necessities, why would you stay in that profession? And if we don't look after our teachers, we won't be growing the next generation of musicians.
SPEAKER_00I mean, but bearing in mind you guys look after the whole music profession. You're the perfect person to answer this. Is it is it simply a symptom of a wider cultural thing of just devaluing music?
SPEAKER_01I think it might be. I have puzzled on this long and hard because we obviously as an organization have been lobbying around Brexit as well, which is devastating. But touring for performers who worked in Europe. I mean, it's it's very, very bad. And the level of costs now associated with touring in Europe make it virtually impossible. Um and we campaigned really hard on that, in terms of saying to government, you must do something, you must protect this industry, otherwise it will go under the wheels of Brexit. And we did say to government everything that needed to happen, nothing happened, and now we've got bands unable to talk because of the costs of things like cabotage and carnage. We also saw that with um what happened over COVID, obviously the furlough scheme was absolutely brilliant, but you needed to be employed. Most musicians are not employed, and therefore they were within the self-employed scheme, which had lots of problems to it. And again, we campaigned, and we know some of our members ended up on universal credit. It was very, very bad. And when the COVID recovery grant came out, um, there was this, oh, isn't this brilliant? Well, yes and no, because it didn't go to the freelance community, it went to institutions, you know, bricks and mortar, which I do understand you want to keep the bricks and mortar going, but you do need the musicians to put into the venues. So if I look across education, Brexit, and Covid, I do wonder if this government really is invested in the arts.
SPEAKER_00Wow. I guess there is still a wider cultural feeling, you know, government aside, of you know, maybe being a musician really isn't a proper job in that sense. I I know I've certainly felt this in COVID. Um I remember that first week of my Facebook stream became just because I'm friends with a lot of musicians, obviously, apart from just live streaming musicians, it was a lot of I'm in trouble, uh, this isn't going well, you know. Can you help? Can you help? And I remember starting to pick up on uh a little bit of animosity sometimes towards that because of how sometimes actually that can almost seem like we we're not understanding or empathetic of other people's situations. So I don't know, for me it was financially terrifying, but actually I was pretty scared of COVID and I didn't have to go out and do anything, whereas someone else still had to get on the bus to go to, you know, a crowded bus to go to work. So there can be that sort of culturally, can't there, that we all sit as sensitive musicians thinking we're very important. I think I'm very important. But you know, I mean the reality is maybe maybe we're not, maybe we don't matter.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I don't know. I think Plato would have a thing to say about that. Uh there's a lot of well, he said that you know you have to have music at the heart of everything you do, it's part of being a human being.
SPEAKER_00But does it require us to earn money into to it to be an industry?
SPEAKER_01I'm not sure how you're going to eat without money. I mean, perhaps you've got you can make food up. I don't know, but you've got a very large allotment. But I think it's really important that um for the soul of our country that we properly appreciate our creatives. And I'm not just talking about musicians, I'm also talking about visual artists, craft, theatre, because I know theatre's got a lot of problems because my husband works in theatre. It's really important that we appreciate, value, nurture all of our creatives and look after them because we would all be so much the poorer without music, without being able to go to a museum or a live gig or to the theatre or to an art gallery. We need that because we are sentient beings who really engage in and are connected to the arts, it is a profound part of being a human being.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we're all right though, aren't we, talking about that? Because obviously we agree with each other 100%. But then when the the narrative in the news is focused around um uh economy growth or you know, gross domestic product, and then such a large proportion of people don't go to gigs or museums, you know, it's it feels I'm gonna disagree with you there, Chris, because if you have a look at GDP, GDP for the creative industries is £116 billion per annum.
SPEAKER_01It is the same as the financial sector or the construction sector.
SPEAKER_00Wow. So people strumming on guitars and your Wall Street types, they're the literally the same.
SPEAKER_01They are the same.
SPEAKER_00Oh, that's wonderful.
SPEAKER_01Every single musician and theatre person and visual artist should be out there telling all their friends that statistic.
SPEAKER_00That's incredible. So can you break can you unpack that one for me a little bit? I won't unpack that for you, you know.
SPEAKER_01But I I know from the DCMS, and it is the DCMS, it's their figures.
SPEAKER_00Um, because government tracks, what's that?
SPEAKER_01The Department for Culture, Media Management. Oh, okay, cool, cool. Government. So they do an analysis of who's generating what, as does finance, etc. And those are the latest figures. We will have taken a hit, a big hit, because of the pandemic and Brexit. But pre-the pandemic and pre-Brexit, our sector, when you add in everybody, and it's a big sector, that's the other thing. There's millions of people working in it, it's £116 billion per annum. The same as construction, the same as the financial sector. So we do not discount it. It's just foolish to discount it and forget about it.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we could just stop talking about good for the soul and well-being and all that stuff and just put that on the table, couldn't we? So it's just absurd that it's not in that valued in that same way.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. So you go back to what I was saying about the education offer, which is out there at the moment. If you look at some of the research out there, it shows that an awful lot of jobs are going to disappear because of automation. There are some jobs, in particular in the creative sector, that are not going to disappear. So actually, it makes much more sense if you're doing a business plan for UK to be investing in those areas where you could see growth and sustainability. And that is the creative industries.
SPEAKER_00I reckon, Deborah, what would be wonderful to hear now is what you think is going to happen now. Because you're obviously in this position of awareness, if you like, of a deep understanding of what's happening across the music education landscape. Um, and you know, you're asking the questions and sort of making the demands, but what do you think realistically is going to happen then in the next five years? And you know, even aside from national plans, what do you think is really tangible stuff that's gonna happen?
SPEAKER_01That is such a good question, Chris. And I spend so much time firefighting, I very rarely think about the next five years. Um I'm not sure it's a brilliant outlook, actually, because so much has been cut or is being cut. So, for instance, the bursaries for would-be teachers in the humanities have all been cut, I think, apart from geography. Um, so that's not great. Um, I think government isn't very keen on people studying the humanities at a higher level. Um I think music and the creative arts will continue to disappear from the maintained sector, uh, including academies. I think if you're in the independent sector, it will all be fine. I think the cost of living crisis could well impact on instrumental teaching because people won't have the money to fund little Johnny's violin lessons. I think uh Brexit, unless we get some kind of cultural exemption, is going to continue to wreak havoc on the music sector and to a lesser extent the theatre sector. My only hope, because I do try and stay hopeful, I am told that I'm too negative, and I do try and find the positive, but sometimes it's really difficult. Um is that technology may be of some kind of assistance in terms of bringing musicians together and creating art which they can then stream in some kind of a way. Because I know there's been a huge amount of work around getting those sonic waves to talk to one another at the same time. Um, and I also know that music musicians are, you know, just people who are fundamentally ingenious, you know, they are entrepreneurs, they're always trying to find the answer. Uh they can be a little bit, you know, ducking and diving, but I love that about them. I love their ducking and diving. So I think if anybody can come up with a solution to all these various challenges, it it is going to be the musician. Because they love what they do, they have a passion for it, they are utterly authentic and real, and they have a drive which I think is unmatched. So they will try and find a way, but the odds are pretty stacked against them at the moment.
SPEAKER_00Tough times. Thank you, Deborah. That was um a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much for all your time.
SPEAKER_01Brilliant.