Have your say: letters to the editor, September 2022

Haddow (1931), Newsom (1963), Music Education of Young Children 1970–1977, Music in the Secondary School Curriculum (1973–1980), The Arts in Schools (1982), The Music Manifesto (2004–2006), the National Plan for Music Education (2011), The Music Commission (2017), ISM reports, and quite a few Ofsted publications have all demonstrated that music in schools is suffering and it still is.

Yet this suffering is despite the national curriculum, which has statutory programmes of study and attainment targets for music at Key Stages 1 to 3. The government website says of the music national curriculum: ‘They are issued by law; you must follow them unless there's a good reason not to. All local-authority-maintained schools should teach them.’ Yet we know that the academies programme and accountability measures such as the EBacc and Progress 8 are barriers to musical progression in many schools.