I'm sitting in a hall in a primary school, about an hour from Milan in northern Italy. A class of around 40 eight-to-nine-year-olds sit in semicircle rows with various instruments on their laps – clarinets, cellos, violins, recorders. Electronic keyboards, a couple of pianos, some classroom percussion and various pieces of a drumkit are scattered around.
Over the next hour, I watch a single music teacher pull together a brand-new piece of music with the group. Some of it has been written for them by a local secondary school teacher; other parts are extemporised during the lesson. The group and their teacher work towards a performance-ready version of the piece, and the teacher writes on the board a mixture of western notation and graphic score to make a record of the music they create. I don't understand the language of the discussions that break out here and there – some led by the teacher, some between the students as they work in small groups – but I can understand the intentions and outcomes of the lesson perfectly. At the core of the entire lesson is the language of music-making.
Legislating for Culture
As I watch, I'm told by my Italian colleague Annalisa Spadolini that this type of creative music teaching can be seen in a few schools up and down the country, but as music is only very recently a statutory requirement of the Italian school curriculum, the experience that students receive – if any – is heavily dependent on whether the school has access to an expert music teacher. Spadolini is a key figure in Italian music education: she is coordinator of the National Committee for Practical Musical Learning for All Students, a ministry department that controls the funding, content and delivery of music education from early years to higher education across Italy.
In 2017, the committee, led by Luigi Berlinguer – minister of education from 1996 to 2000 and a formidable politician with a track record of revolutionising Italian education – introduced a ground-breaking piece of legislation. ‘Piano Delle Arti’ requires all schools in Italy to ensure that arts and culture form part of the curriculum as a statutory requirement. In an effort to turn policy into practice, a comprehensive programme of curriculum and assessment design, plus teacher training, is being funded and rolled out across all phases of education in the country.
I have been working with Spadolini and the team in Italy for about 10 months on this programme. Trinity College London has a long history of working in Italian state education in the world of English language learning, and our English Language connections with Berlinguer go back many years. We're very fortunate to be working now with Spadolini and the committee, drawing on our experience of examples of best practice around the world in assessment and teacher training in music education.
It has personally been an enlightening introduction to working with government and policy makers outside of the UK. I initially expected to have to roll out well-rehearsed arguments about the importance of music in schools, and steeled myself for discussion around ‘music education for the sake of music education’ – but so far, no case has had to be made. At the heart of this work is the refreshing belief that music education is an essential ingredient of school provision, and that young people's educational experience is impoverished without it. In the many meetings and conferences I have attended and delivered alongside Spadolini, I have heard her speak eloquently on the subject – often also touching on the correlation between music study and broader academic benefits – but at the heart of her message is a belief that music education is critically important in its own right.
Working with Spadolini has been the most eye-opening part of the project to date, and her energy and passion for her cause is boundless. Supported by the committee and the Italian national research organisation INDIRE, she is also spearheading work on inclusion and SEND, developing technologies in the music classroom, and building the (as it is known in Italy) ‘vertical integration’ from early years to higher education to ensure continuity of experience.
Spadolini and colleagues are catalysing existing networks and creating new ones, supporting expert teachers to share their experience, and developing training programmes for others. They are working on ensuring a balance of styles and genres for a healthy diet of musical traditions for young people to learn from. The model of leadership is inspiring: a group of expert teachers, musicians, researchers, academics, industry figures and bureaucrats working together with a common aim, at the heart of which are the musical experiences of young people in Italy.
UK Applications
I can't help but draw comparisons to our own situation in the UK, notwithstanding the differences in contexts and funding. There is an interesting blurring of what might be considered traditional divisions in the UK. There are no silos of classroom and instrumental teachers, for example; access and inclusion are seen as the responsibility of every teacher and every organisation, rather than the purview of a selection of experts; and research belongs to everyone with no hint of divide between academia and grass roots. In drawing comparisons, it would be easy to adopt one of two extremes – either to dismiss the Italian context as having no relevance to the UK, or to be overly critical of the UK situation – but I believe there is a healthy middle ground where the exchange of experience and expertise might be made to the benefit of all nations.
For example, one aspect of the programme of work that Trinity has responsibility for is an impact study that tracks and analyses the effects of any schemes of work, resources and training to better understand the outcomes of the programme over the next three years. This is a mixed-methods research study and should yield some interesting findings in terms of how teachers and pupils are engaged with and impacted by the development of music education programmes in schools. To what degree the results of this will be directly transferable to the UK is yet unknown, but we can assume that there will be some useful findings to feed into UK music education development.
There is also much potential for meaningful connections between UK and Italian music teachers. Of course, there is a wealth of expertise that UK teachers could offer Italian colleagues, but some of the most inspiring conversations I have had over the last few months have been with Italian teachers who are revelling in the chance to design a curriculum from the ground up that will be directly relevant and meaningful for the students they have in their classrooms now, without any requirement to navigate ideologically loaded curricula of the past.
Spadolini and I are lucky enough to have been offered a keynote session at the next Music and Drama Education Expo to speak about the programme. We hope to share findings and receive feedback that we can fold into the next phase, as well as offering outcomes from the programme that might be found useful.
In a time of such political uncertainty in the UK and changing policy frameworks for education more generally, it is hoped that through inviting debate about this work a culture of sharing practice can be established across European nations – and that the Italian ministry's clear and strong commitment to the importance of music education might provide an aspirational model to UK policy makers.
Annalisa Spadolini, coordinator of the National Committee for Practical Musical Learning for All Students in Italy
Francesca Christmas and Annalisa Spadolini (pictured) will give a presentation at the London 2020 Music and Drama Education Expo on 5 March at 2.45pm.
