MH: How did your early days shape your views on music education, and how did you become a researcher?
MF: I started as a classroom music teacher in Birmingham in 1978. I did an in-service Master's in Music Education because there was more that I wanted to think about. This was mainly taught, but there was also some research, and I got the research bug. Through a combination of circumstances, I got the opportunity to go to Cambridge to do a PhD in music teaching, looking at composing and assessment. I completed the PhD and, rather than find answers, came up with better questions. From then on I worked in higher education, teaching on PGCE courses and gradually doing more and more research.
Some things I experienced when teaching made me think about the barriers to all-round music education. I was instrumental in setting up BMERG [the Birmingham Music Education Research Group] and one of the things this does is to research barriers of all sorts. I saw a number of barriers – not just financial or systemic, but attitudinal from a whole range of people, some in positions who should have known better. I was an idealistic young teacher and I wanted to do something about it. (I've been saying for a number of years that I segued neatly from being an angry young man to a grumpy old man, with not much in between.)
MH: Can you give a instance of noticing a barrier?
MF: I remember going to a central rehearsal of one of the Birmingham ensembles meant for children of primary age. The person taking the rehearsal asked: ‘How many of you are going to go to grammar school in September?’ Lots of children put their hands up, and I thought: ‘Does that mean you're discounting the children I teach from your ensemble? What about the children who aren't going to grammar schools? And why are you so keen on pointing out this?’ Probably, the children who aren't putting their hands up are going to get this for the rest of their lives. There was a corollary that [it was in grammar schools] that the good music was happening, and I felt uncomfortable with it. The kids I was teaching were just as worthy of being in this ensemble as the others.
I always taught in comprehensive schools. I've taught kids who've gone on to the highest achievement, in terms of further study and musical prowess. And I've taught kids for whom that isn't the case, but I'd like to think they've had the opportunity. I care about giving them the opportunity to do something they couldn't do, or might not even have thought of doing.
MH: How can we turn attitudinal barriers around?
MF: We have to think about accountability. All the time we've got the EBacc, it legitimises sidelining music. If we can get rid of the EBacc, music won't be systemically sidelined – it might still be attitudinally sidelined, but there won't be the offcial permission, as it were, to say: ‘It doesn't matter because it's not in the EBacc.’ I think that's my first hope for the future.
MH: You've written extensively about assessment in music. What are your main concerns?
MF: I've always worried about assessment. I think we have a systemic problem with the ways in which assessment is viewed. First, formative assessment doesn't feel like assessment when it's done properly; it doesn't involve necessarily giving grades or marks, or writing things down. In music education we have done proper formative assessment since time immemorial. It's how Bach taught: you talk to the learners, have conversations with them, and help them get better – that's formative assessment. I think what happened in Music is that people from other subjects who didn't understand what formative assessment was came along and told us we were doing it wrong. And because your average music teacher hasn't got time to delve into assessment literature and research, they just went along with whatever it was that the person from another subject told them. So, I think formative assessment needs reclaiming. The ‘experts’ shouldn't tell us how to do it; they should be asking us how to do it.
Second, what bothers me is over-frequent summative assessment. We don't need to give kids a grade at the same frequency as, say, Maths. If you're a Maths teacher, you might see students four or five times a week, so you've had that many lessons with them in a week; in Music, if you see them once a fortnight, five lessons might take ten weeks. So, if you say we need assessment grades every four weeks for Maths, they're taken every 20 lessons, whereas for Music that would only be two lessons. I think we should be looking at not lumping things all together in ways that are totally inappropriate. We don't need this continuous summative assessment data or need it over-frequently; and we don't need people trying to draw straight lines on a graph for different things. Music has very widespread content in the National Curriculum. If we think of its three pillars – composing, listening, performing – kids can have differential profiles in each of them, and expecting some sort of linearity of response is utterly silly. It's just not appropriate.
MH: How could assessment in music be structured?
MF: I think we need to persuade people in positions of power in schools to look at the situation I've just described. Unfortunately, if I go into a school and say ‘I think this [change] is a good idea’, they'll see me as a random, out-of-touch academic. If we say ‘Ofsted say this is a good idea’, they all fall off their chairs to try and comply. Ofsted have said very publicly that assessments in Music should be done exactly in the way I've been describing. So pay attention! Music teachers need to come around to thinking that Ofsted is actually on their side in this regard, and use Ofsted materials as leverage. That's one thing we can do that doesn't require a change in anything other than the way it's presented to the powers that be.
MH: You mentioned the three pillars of composing, listening and performing. What is the importance of composition in the classroom?
MF: I'm going to say immediately that I want to talk about the importance of composing, because I see a difference between the noun and the verb. I think the moment we use ‘composition’, it sounds very different. I've done quite a bit of work with Nancy Evans and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group – we've been working on the Listen Imagine Compose project for many years. I've always included composing in my teaching. John Paynter published Sound and Silence back in 1970; that was contentious and there were arguments about composing in the classroom then. When I started teaching, these were still going on. Then, in 1979, Keith Swanwick published A Basis for Music Education and there didn't seem to be quite as much furore.
The first GCSE exams were in 1988, and I was involved in piloting GCSE Music. I remember jumping on this opportunity because I wanted to include composing. This was a major feature of the GCSE from the off, and I was all in favour of it. Then, a little bit later, the National Curriculum was introduced and that included composing. But although it's been there for a long time, I think people still worry about this area the most, and there are all sorts of reasons for this, including how the only model of progression that teachers have had is the graded music exam. So, graded music exam thinking has permeated progression thinking in music education for a long time, and that's all about acquisition of musical competence.
What the graded music exams do, they do very well. But if we try to apply this model to composing, it's not quite the same. I think people who've come through this sort of developmental model of graded exam thinking have had problems applying that to composing. So, there are conceptualisation issues, and this gets passed down. Once we can get under the skin of composing and composing pedagogy, that could change.
There's a great piece in April's Music Teacher [2025] by Kay Charlton about introducing composing to instrumental music lessons; so it's there, in the system, people are doing it. I just think that teachers probably need a little more hand-holding. We're not interested in doing things which only appeal to the mythical gifted few; this is composing as a regular, ordinary part of schooling people. Adults don't balk at kids painting pictures in school or writing poetry. But when you say ‘composing music’, this somehow gets seen as being for the ‘gifted’ few.
MH: What developments have you seen in your years in music education?
MF: I think we've had numbers of parallel strands operating at the same time. I mentioned Paynter's Sound and Silence. That was in 1970; so 55 years ago there was already an alternative strand running in music education. But alongside this there was the New National Song Book, and singing ‘Men of Harlech’ and so on. It's an issue that we are still facing in music education today, and you can see this in the breadth of the curriculum.
There's also assessment ‘washback’: the way that the examination syllabus – if people need to prepare kids for this exam syllabus in however many years’ time – is constraining what's happening at Key Stage 3. This might not be so if we didn't have the breadth and different ways of thinking about what Music is.
Also, for some music teachers in the past, the reason for being a teacher wasn't what you did in the classroom, but what you did outside it. You saved your energy for the school choir or orchestra, and just ticked along in the classroom without really wanting to put in too much effort. So, if you could give out the books, play the piano and hack your way through ‘The Ash Grove’, say, it didn't take a great deal other than discipline – there wasn't a lot of thinking or preparation involved. Once you start broadening out, however, this approach becomes more problematic.
Cultural capital has also become an issue in terms of the different ways that people think about what culture is. There are some very diverging views. As a music educator, I have been cornered in the past and told the job of music education is to make children love classical music – and this is always by people who have never actually done it or tried to do it, or thought more about it other than ‘My music education made me love classical music.’ I would say that I'm not at all of the opinion that the job of music education is to make people love classical music, but there is a strand of thinking that says it is. I don't think you make people love something by giving them a lot of things they don't like. The attitude ‘You will like this and it is good for you’ is never going to prevail.
MH: So what is the job of music education?
MF: Music education covers everything from generalist classroom music teaching through to specialist instrumental and vocal teaching – all separate but related strands of music education. One of the things music education shares with PE and sport, or drama, is having lots of parallel tracks running, but then these veer off in different directions. Sometimes, music educators aren't cognisant of what's going on in a set of parallel tracks running alongside the ones they're on, and sometimes people on one set of tracks say unhelpful things about the people on another. They don't mean to be unhelpful or disparaging, but they can be. So, the job of music education is huge, broad, multifaceted.
In terms of why do we teach Music, I think it's because the subject provides a separate and different way of thinking from other subjects on the curriculum. It doesn't matter if that music is Mozart string quartets or Techno Drill, it's still a different way of thinking.
MH: How can you assess what someone has gained from a music education?
MF: I think this is one of the diffcult issues for us because it's not necessarily an immediate thing that becomes apparent once you've done it. Someone can do a bricklaying course, and if they can lay the bricks in a straight line and flat, they can go and get a job. Music education isn't like that. It's stays with you, and you might revisit it. It might have an effect on you in ways that you don't realise as you go through life. It can open doors that people don't actually choose to go through until maybe much later. But if we don't open those doors, people won't know they exist. So, we need to think about how many doors can we open; or alternatively, we want to think about barriers, how many doors are we shutting on people? I do some work with OHMI [the One-Handed Musical Instrument Trust], and you see barriers all the time in terms of what people think kids who have upper limb differences can do.
There's a lot to do in music education that's diffcult to encompass within the role of a single person. And another problem here is that many secondary schools have, I think, 1.4 music teachers – that's a huge volume of work for 1.4 people to cover.
MH: What broad developments have you seen in school music-making and instrumental music teaching?
MF: There was a time when people would say, ‘I'm not having pop music in my classroom!’ Music teachers don't see it like that today. Even at a conservatoire, people play in the orchestra one day, the jazz band the next, and then they've got a rock band gig. This is normal; this is being a portfolio musician in the 21st century.
One thing that winds people up is the change from the old music services to music hubs. There's a lot of rose-tinted rear vision in terms of what it was like then. People will say, ‘It was great in the old days, you didn't have to pay for music lessons and look at all the provision we got.’ But whether or not you got that provision was at the discretion of the county music adviser. I've likened it to a Renaissance court: it was the patronage of the favourites. It might have been great in a grammar school, whereas for a school half a mile away, it was quite the opposite. Yes, it was free at the point of delivery, but nothing is ever free – somebody, somewhere is paying for it.
Today, the music hubs don't have enough money – that's a given – but it's systematically unfair now, rather than unfair on the whim. So the unfairness is more straightforward and transparent than it was. It's too early to say what difference current developments with the new Hub Lead Organisations will make, but I do think that things are more transparent.
MH: Who is going to provide these services, given fewer people are training to teach music? What should policymakers take into account?
MF: We talked about the EBacc earlier, which should be scrapped. That would do a lot. I was appointed to teach on PGCE courses, and I would say: ‘Get out the way of the PGCE, politicians, stop tinkering and interfering with it!’ If there is going to be legislation, make it more minimal so that there isn't this constant battle about the ways in which anti-university thinking has developed – and we know that there was a political imperative to take teacher training out of universities.
Further, we don't have enough music teachers, and the number of teachers (in all subjects) leaving the profession is huge. I think a couple of things can be done about this. First, we need a better pipeline for school music teachers. Bringing back the bursary has done something for this; I don't think people should pay to train to be teachers, so we need bursaries. But we also need less interference in ITE, and an entitlement to CPD. In many other countries, there is a requirement that teachers have CPD on an annual basis. It doesn't matter how long you've been teaching – CPD is absolutely essential. And I don't think teachers should have to pay to go on their own CPD courses.
MH: What areas of research interest you now?
MF: In addition to composing, assessment, and barriers, I've been thinking about ‘quality’ for some years. It bothers me that quality has often not been measured in any qualitative way; it's been quantitative – ‘bums on seats’. There is a difference between a quantitative methodology and a qualitative one. In many cases, quality has been judged by participation, and I think we need to think differently.
I'm also bothered by what I consider British isolationism, the Brexit mentality. There's a perfectly good organisation called the European Association for Music in Schools that most [British] teachers probably don't know anything about. There's also the International Society for Music Education – ditto. There's very little awareness. Why is that? People don't know much about music education in other countries and, in a way, I think the government has encouraged this, unless it's a comparison like ‘Oh, Finland's doing great.’ Well, what's Finnish music education like, and German and French music education? There's a lot that Britain has ignored: we carry on doing things our way.
Martin Fautley receiving the 2025 Music & Drama Education Award for Lifetime Achievement – Photo © Colin Miller
