It's not a good time to be a good, qualified, trained, experienced, dedicated, hard-working peripatetic music teacher

The TES covered the story in Canbridge. It's sacking all its 68 periptetic music teachers, and re-employing them as coaches/instructors and paying them, obviously well below the Qualified Teachers Rate, is 1. astonishing, 2. unprofessional, and 3, extremely short-sighted.

Read the story In TES March 1st 2013:

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6323273

And it's not just in Cambridge. Music Services all over the UK are struggling. The "cuts" in general affects all council workers, but music services are one massive casualty from the despicable academisation of what what once were state schools. Until the Adonis-Balls-Gove continuum set out on their course to destabilise the UK public education one tenth of every school's money went to the local authority so they could run all the school support services.

The government's arguments runs thus: academies are free from local control. But schools had been happily paying up so experts could work together and provide SEN, governor support, a music service, union support - all that stuff. Now it's been dismembered, unravelled.

Now Music teachers are increasingly being asked to sort out their own taxes, find their own work, have no guaranteed work the following month, let alone the following year. Opportunist private firms have appeared, undercutting the council's music service prices, but not providing the CPD or the big central orchestras.

Sparrows first at National Festival of Music For Youth 2006

Because music services paid trained teachers [with QTS] a proper wage, experienced teachers made their way into them, bringing a wealth of experience with class management and school based skills, meaning that they could provide National Curriculum teaching in those schools which needed it; meaning they could taker the wider opportunities full classes.

Sparrows win UK award and play Royal Albert Hall 2009

But now we have the Gove, who operates from the premise that, if you can do, then you can teach it. [He also seems to think that if you went to Oxford University, you have the right to impose whatever idea pops into your mind to a whole nation.]

Above are two pics of the Leeds Music Service steelband [Leeds Silver Steel Sparrows] comprising children from inner-city Leeds, and playing at the National Festival of Music For Youth; quite impossible without the infrastructure that a city-wide service can offer, and the professionals who teach and run it.

I have had to use pics of my own band here, because they are what's on my computer at present.