Conservatoires and other Higher Music Education Institutions (HMEIs) have a responsibility to contribute to the development of the music education workforce. This is not just as a means of maintaining their recruitment pipelines for the future; it is important for ensuring that their graduates go on to be responsible and competent musicians and educators who have the capacity to inspire the next generation of musical learners.
Commonly, conservatoire music students are defined by their ‘principal study’, and are trained to high levels of proficiency in disciplines such as performance and composition. Hence they assume the identity of violinist, soprano, composer and so forth from an early stage.
The principal study holds significant sway in conservatoires, often dominating the students' entire learning journey. While this specialist emphasis is useful on many levels, helping students to focus on developing some areas of their practice, it may be detrimental in terms of developing a wider range of musician identities.
As Simon Toyne wrote in an earlier edition of Music Teacher (January, 2025), teacher and musician are equally important and complement one another: ‘the more you develop as a teacher, the more you develop as a musician, and vice versa’. Music educators come in multiple forms, and we couldn't agree more with Toyne's argument that instrumental/vocal teachers are often undervalued and overlooked. Yet, they represent a vital part of the music education ecosystem and make significant contributions that enhance what can be offered in classroom music.
At Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC) we have worked for over a decade to challenge the notion that ‘if you're a teacher, you're a failed musician’ (Shaw, 2023a). We continually raise the profile of instrumental teaching and music leading as vitally important and rewarding roles for graduates.
Developing music educator identities
One way in which we have nurtured conservatoire students as music educators is to ensure that pedagogical training is threaded through the entire undergraduate curriculum, with provision building on what has been learned previously. While there are many postgraduate qualifications available for music educators committed to their ongoing professional development, arguably, by this point, valuable time has been lost, during which students could have been developing their pedagogical skills, qualities, awareness, behaviours and values (Shaw, 2023b). At RBC, undergraduate students can accrue pedagogical knowledge across a period of three to four years, so that when they graduate, many already see themselves as music educators and have a firm foundation from which to continue learning ‘on the job’ and/or via postgraduate study at RBC or elsewhere. For example, our flexible CPD programme, the ‘PgCert Musician as Educator’, is designed to support musicians at all career stages, who may be working across a range of different educational settings and seeking to develop alongside like-minded peers.
However, for many conservatoire students whose primary aspiration is to perform, it can take many years to develop a music educator mindset in tandem with their performing musician identity. A survey of 92 first-year music students conducted at RBC in 2019 revealed that 76 (81%) arrived at the Conservatoire having already gained some experience of supporting young people's musical learning in educational contexts. Building on these prior experiences through core modules in music leadership, and instrumental, vocal or composition teaching across years 1 and 2, we discovered that students gradually became more altruistic in outlook, showing greater interest in how they could utilise their principal study-related skills and knowledge to influence positively the musical learning of others. Students also acknowledged numerous connections between many other aspects of the undergraduate music curriculum that were pertinent to their development as music educators and their potential future work in educational contexts. Subsequently, through participating in a range of teaching and music leadership placements across years 3 and 4, students came to appreciate not only ‘the things you can gain’ as a musician, but also ‘the things you can give’. In the words of one graduate:
You're the one giving, you're the one motivating, and that's exactly what I want to do. I want to be on that end rather than the other end […]. You are inspiring these kids. You're their role model. You are who some of them want to be. It's motivating for me thinking ‘you can give something back’ and nothing will beat seeing the satisfaction and the smiles on their faces when they've learned something.
Credit-bearing collaboration
Linking music education-focused modules with aspects of RBC's Learning and Participation provision has enabled students to gain further academic credits for their external work with diverse communities. For example, a music technology student, currently designing new curriculums and facilitating composition workshops for primary school children, is simultaneously working towards assessment for a pedagogy placement module. Other students are honing their pedagogical knowledge and teaching skills (and gaining credits for doing so in many cases) in contexts such as Junior RBC, Melody Music Birmingham (a SEND charity), RBC's Young Composer's Project, or one of the many other arts education organisations in Birmingham and the wider West Midlands.
Investing in instrumental teacher training
It was implied within NPME2 that instrumental teachers belong to an ‘out-of-school workforce’. Perhaps, at least in part, this was an attempt to differentiate classroom teachers with QTS from instrumental teaching practitioners who are classed as ‘unqualified’, despite their specialist musical credentials. Arguably, this ‘out-of-school’ terminology oversimplifies matters, given that alongside those instrumental teachers working in private practice, significant numbers work in classrooms, not least due to the reach of Whole Class Ensemble Teaching (WCET) across England. Indeed, many teaching musicians manage portfolio careers that involve a mixture of classroom, out-of-school teaching activities and performance.
Despite our efforts to engage and inspire students to develop their skills as music educators, many feel unsupported when they graduate, experiencing teacher anxiety (Shaw, 2024) or suggesting that they have felt ‘thrown in at the deep end’ when starting a new instrumental/vocal teaching role. Even though pedagogical training may have formed part of a conservatoire education, there is still much to learn about different kinds of settings, and graduates need further support to cross the threshold from music student to professional music educator.
We are aware that there are some excellent internship schemes across England, but that many more hubs and schools could make use of the Apprenticeship Levy (DfE, 2023) as a means of offering instrumental teacher training to new graduates. This could even lead to a new embedded practice-based, nationally recognised graduate-level instrumental teaching qualification.
There are also many partnerships between music education hubs and conservatoires/other HMEIs that are working well, but there is scope to develop these and provide a national network of music educator training for undergraduates. Arguably, instrumental teachers who can be supported to develop continually – through undergraduate training and into their early careers – are more likely to value teaching as a long-term route with professional growth as opposed to (as we often hear) ‘a way to pay the bills’.
As for those graduates interested in training as classroom teachers, the recently reintroduced bursary for postgraduate teacher training in Music could be reviewed and increased. Doing so could help to ensure that graduates emerging from conservatoires and other HMEIs feel valued in equal measure to STEM subject trainees, and sufficiently supported (and motivated) to further their careers as teaching musicians.
‘I'm just teaching’
We work hard to counteract entrenched negative attitudes around teaching by inviting graduates who are thriving as music educators to share their early-career experiences with current students. However, we still encounter graduates who, when asked how their career is going, respond with ‘I'm just teaching’, as if they should be apologising for being part of this valuable profession! We sometimes even hear of faint praise such as ‘you might not make a performer, but you'd make a good teacher’. We all need to work together to challenge and move away from this kind of thinking.
Conservatoires and other HMEIs can help build up notions of value around music teaching (in all its forms) as a career choice. Taking steps to eradicate disparaging remarks and negative attitudes around teaching careers for conservatoire graduates, through increasing dialogue and growing more partnerships with external music education providers, could help move towards this much-needed cultural shift.
