Fighting for Music and the Arts to take their rightful place in Education

Hoping to push Music and the Arts up the agenda at NEU Conference I had this mini speech ready as a support to an amendment about a broad and balanced curriculum. As nobody was speaking against the amendment I wasn't called on the day and so thinking I wouldn’t get to speak, I blogged and then deleted  said speech. 

The prepared speech is below, as is a video of the speech I ended up making when finally called to speak in "unfinished business". Traumatised by arriving at the podium to discover/remember the speech was deleted, what followed was more of a stand up routine. It served its purpose, but never again! The youtube video of the routine is below too.

"I am speaking in support of an amendment appointment 8.1. The motion itself talks about the stress caused by narrowing of curriculum, and instructs executive to campaign for a child’s right to access a broad and balanced curriculum.

I believe it should go further and talk about how music and the arts should take their proper place in the curriculum as equal in status to STEM subjects. 

Music and the arts give students a place to destress, and a place to find ways of expressing their inner feelings.  And where they can make a spiritual sense of the world around them. Arts are good for mental health. School should be the place where student can discover which is the artform that suits them best, and which they carry through to adulthood.

And for the school students music and the arts do all this without their having to be tested on them.

And can I emphasise that all children should have a right to a broad and balanced curriculum that includes music and arts. We should recognise and remember that music is no more for the future musicians of this world the maths for the future mathematicians. 

Music is for appreciate audiences, and the more you know by playing or by having played yourself, the more you get out of it.

Music is for dancers to dance to, workers to work by, gym bunnies to bounce to. 

I mention music in particular as it has its own practical problems for the school - such as the need for big rooms, expensive equipment and lots of storage space. But for too many primary schools a music room is a thing of the past.

Besides saying we should have a broad and balanced curriculum, let us say how we would broaden and it ,that would be through the life enhancing Arts, looking to the personal rather than professional. And who knows. Maybe through school the next Spice Girls or Nigel Kennedy might also discover their talent. Or even the next karaoke queen.

https://youtu.be/IXIEqAzZP04

Exactly Why Open School Now?

Why go back to school before numbers are down or before test and trace is up and running? Why do it just as people are getting used to the idea? Why choose year six, reception and year one?

Well, here's a thought or two:

1.The government is worried that we might be adjusting too well to the situation, have realised the gravity of it all and have accepted the constraints.

2.Many parents have started to see the benefit to their children’s and to their own mental health. One parent spoke of how much better she felt not having her regular calls from school about how her son hadn’t got his shirt tucked in properly. (Yes really this is what education has come to in this country). Another parent talked about how her daughter has blossomed away from the bullying culture that sadly and all too often prevails in the school system where exam grades are everything and pastoral care is an add-on.

2b. Parents have spotted that not only do children survive, but that they actually thrive without wearing the same clothes as everybody else, taking any high stakes tests, without having any inspectors bob up with suits and serious faces, without having to go into an isolation booth just for being themselves.

No inspections means no damning labels [How awful, how demeaning that a school resorts to tying a vinyl banner to the school gates saying "This school is Good"];it means league tables where schools are compared with each other. The result of this invidious comparison is that the first wave of aspirational parents see the writing on the wall and take their [inevitably high-achieving] children out of School B, then, when the proverbial hits the proverbial, the second wave of aspirational parents take their children out of school, or don't even send them to School B in the first place, and then School B is not now just not as good as School A, but now is not nearly as good. Behaviour spirals downwards. Academic results plummet. Teachers leave the school [and the profession], the aspirationals are nowhere to be seen. The school becomes an academy, and no amount of bullying men and women with suits and inflated salaries can rescue the situation, the school, and the poor poor children who got left behind.

None of this can happen if schools aren't open.

So the government chooses an unlikely set of tactics. 1. Send Dominic Cummings to chase some wild geese in Barnard Castle, and then leak out this information. 2. Alongside this they start to relax the rules on visiting other people and other places. 3.Then they start to talk about poorer kids missing out on education. The poor who were in the isolation booths; the poor who were sent home because their parents couldn't afford to buy the correctly labelled uniform;

But instead of suggesting that schools identify poorer families, they select two random year groups [who are, by their very age least able social distance] and year 6. This in the guise of restoring some sort of normality. Well, Year 6 might well want closure, say goodbye to the school, but the new normal is 1/4 sized classes and 3/4 of them don't get their own teacher. The younger ones have no chance of social distancing without being in some sort of straight jackets, so instead they only become superspreaders. This emphasis on children being more important than school staff and parents is sentimental rubbish. If children's lives, health and happiness are paramount, then making them the bearers of a disease which kills these adults is hardly a good ideas.

In short, the government, having no ideas at all of their own, and being reluctant to take advice from experts, are grasping at straws, but people can't go back to work if one child is in school and the other isn't. Parents aren't going to feel comfortable taking one child to school and bringing the other back. And this, and this doesn't bear thinking about, Yr 1 and Reception will exchange germs and then share them with teachers and relatives, some of whom will die, and some of whom will become immune and be able to go back to work.

So why open schools again exactly?

The strange case of a primary school teacher who is filled with dread of SATs being Scrapped

Letter sent to the Guardian 19 April 2019 for their consideration:

The article in the Guardian of 18 April (“I am a primary school teacher and Corbyn’s plan to scrap SATs fills me with dread”) makes me wonder whether the writer is indeed a teacher. If Solomon K is for real, then he is, in my opinion, in the wrong job. 

The article is wrong on so many counts, and they need addressing. Here are just some:

1. The title. It is not “Corbyn’s Plan”. He is responding to the wishes of thousands and thousands of parents, grandparents, children, teachers, school support workers, headteachers, mental health workers, and school governors.
2. Relying on teachers’ assessments would leave “our most vulnerable children at the mercy of notoriously unreliable judgments”. This is as much insulting as it is quite inaccurate. Teachers make judgments on a daily, hourly even, basis, and they act on them. And is an external examiner going to know better what inferences to draw from any given situation than the person who cares for a child every day?
3. The “unlucky ones have their work moderated by the local authority”. In what way is a local authority less competent, and evidently so much less competent than a central authority?
4. “SATs contribute far less to teacher workload and stress than teacher assessment.” . What are the after-school booster sessions all about then, what’s it like when you know that music has been cancelled, sometimes for the week, sometimes for the year? And you know that music would actually be better at developing cognitive skills than drilling and redrilling - and when Music and all the Arts actually, does so much more as well. 
5. “No one can be creative in a subject they haven’t mastered. Creativity depends on a secure foundation of knowledge”. This shows a deep misunderstanding of the concept of creativity. See Ken Robinson’s Ted talk for an explanation.
6. “Thousands of terrible, terrible teachers” He has been “personally in far too many bad schools. . “ On this insulting, almost libellous and unsubstantiated statement alone, I suggest that the Guardian should have steered clear of taking this person seriously, and using him as their Devil’s Advocate. 

Victoria Jaquiss, Leeds

(Peripatetic teacher, ex-school-based teacher, NEU representative, co-author of “Addressing SEND in the Curriculum: Music”, re-published Routledge 2018)