Challenge accepted: Bravery at GCSE and A Level

The pandemic has forced us all to reassess so many things in our teaching. Endless Zoom and Teams meetings – including extensive discussions erupting about Timmy's cat, who spontaneously appeared during your excellent diatribe about the Baroque period, and forgetting that your microphone is on while you curse the tech-savvy small people – have reaffirmed to us the value of in-person learning, the importance of learning environments, and the immense value of talking about and making music together.

But that alone doesn't tackle the rather daunting problem we now face: how to reignite young people's love for music, how to help them blossom again, and how to push them to become better than before. How do we do that when we're back operating at 500 miles per hour again while spinning nine plates, dealing with half of our ensembles being wiped out by isolations, navigating perpetually shifting plans, and have a now inevitably reduced amount of headroom for ‘busyness' before anxiety sets in? It's no wonder that many music teachers I talk to are feeling a little overwhelmed already this year. And so, if you are feeling daunted and swamped, know that you are not alone.