The current financial forecasts have a ‘dishearteningly familiar feel’, say music teachers who worked through the 2008 financial crisis and into the austerity decade.
Last week, MT reported that music educators feel particularly vulnerable as schools and parents are forced to decide what costs to cut as the cost-of-living crisis continues into the winter months.
Teachers who have been in the profession for over a decade recall job losses and poor mental wellbeing during the 2008 global financial crisis and the early 2010s, when David Cameron’s Conservative government pushed austerity in response to the crash.
‘I complacently thought those days were behind me,’ said Jack Davis*, a primary music specialist, ‘but I’m really worried about the current economic climate.’
‘As music is a peripheral subject in many schools, music teachers may well be the first to go when finances get too tough,’ he added.
‘I was fed up’
In 2012 - the year in which the UK experienced its first double-dip recession since the 1970s - Davis was teaching music in a sixth-form college on a 0.5 contract.
When the head of department went on maternity leave, Davis was asked to take on all of her responsibilities (on a 0.6 contract), as well as broaden the music offer to recoup money for the department.
‘Working 70-hour weeks while only being paid for three days really took its toll on my wellbeing, and having to do more unpaid hours meant my total income took a big plunge, along with my mental health and the quality of my teaching,’ said Davis.
Six months later, his college offered voluntary redundancies and Davis ‘bit their hand off’. ‘By this time,’ he said, ‘I was fed up with teaching for very little reward and vowed never to work as a teacher again.’
He ‘fell back in love with the job’ a few years later after taking on primary supply work, but now Davis is worried. ‘Huge leaps forward have been made in primary music education in recent years, and it would be a real shame if this is all undone by the economic crisis.’
‘I used a foodbank, and I didn’t feel ashamed’
It’s not just classroom music teachers who are reflecting on past struggles in light of the current climate - visiting or private instrumental teachers are equally as concerned.
In 2008, Claire Swift* was a recent music college graduate picking up freelance work and finding it ‘tough to get by’ financially, but managed to secure a job teaching instrumental lessons at a day school for girls.
‘I loved the work but when the recession hit, the school had an entire class size less for the Year 7 intake, so there were fewer students to recruit from. I also had issues with the school not paying on time or dropping lessons with no notice.’
Within a few months, Swift was in debt. ‘I sometimes feel I handled my money badly, not reacting fast enough to the situation and cutting my outgoings or looking for another job,’ she said. ‘But I also didn’t have enough savings or any support network to ride out the storm.’
‘It was very depressing for a while. I ended up on benefits and taking antidepressants to help me sleep as I was so worried.’
When the pandemic hit a decade later, Swift experienced a ‘similar situation’. ‘I lost all my work overnight and went on benefits again - this time around I worked really hard to get other work going straight away and I told people I was struggling.’
‘I used a foodbank, and I didn’t feel ashamed. I just thought, this time it’s survival and I have to move fast and assume the worst until proven otherwise.’
‘The first thing to be hit’
Anne Templer, a peripatetic instrumental teacher, said that there is a ‘dishearteningly familiar feel to the latest forecasts’.
Templer recalls how, after the 2008 crash, she lost a whole day of teaching in one school she was working in. ‘This amounted to a third of my teaching at the time, and I wasn’t the only one - loads of my colleagues had similar results and, perhaps shockingly, this was in a private school.’
‘We all know that in difficult economic times, the arts - and more specifically, music lessons - are often the first thing to be hit, said Templer. ‘It doesn’t seem to matter whether the school and its area are affluent or not.’
She added that music teachers and musicians generally have ‘never entirely recovered’ from the ‘various economic shocks’ of the last few years, meaning that some have left the profession, some have diversified, and others have ‘hardened’.
‘They will duck and dive as usual - they will hang on in there, but a little bit more of the spirit is lost every time.’
*Name has been changed for anonymity.
