• Imagining a plan for cultural education

    With the announcement following the publication of the White paper in England that work would begin on a National Plan for Cultural Education many will have applauded the announcement, and many will see this as part of a long history of policy and approaches that sought to champion cultural education. Music education has received considerable…

  • (Re)learning how to teach music in the secondary school

    (Re)learning how to teach music in the secondary school

    Thanks to Twitter and a group of fellow music educators I have started a collaborative blogging effort to work through a selection of the tasks in the edited volume ‘Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School‘. The venture was inspired by a tweet I saw from Christine Counsell. The cog sci is a useful…

  • Imagining a plan for cultural education: revisited

    Four years ago, in the days after the government first announced it would begin work on a National Plan for Cultural Education, I wrote a post that was really a brainstorm dressed up as a blog. I asked more questions than I answered: who cultural learning professionals are, whether the local can ever be a…

  • Knowledgeable skills or skilful knowledge? Revisited

    An update on my 2018 Impact article, for a policy landscape that has completely changed Back in 2018, when I wrote the original version of this piece for Impact, the knowledge-versus-skills debate in music education was mostly a philosophical argument. Nick Gibb was telling anyone who would listen that a knowledge-rich National Curriculum had “put knowledge…

  • Building a Culture of Professional Learning

    Reflections from an HMC workshop I opened a workshop I gave at HMC this June with a question I didn’t really expect anyone to answer out loud: when did you last genuinely learn something as a professional? Not attend something, learn something. The room went quiet in the way rooms do when a question lands somewhere…

  • Nurturing Every Student’s Creative Ambitions 

    Students arrive in our classrooms with extraordinary creative ambition. Across the arts, technology and design, young people bring a wealth of creative experience with them; real, sustained ambition that’s ours to nurture and grow. The question I find most exciting as a teacher isn’t how to spark that ambition, but how to give it the best…

  • From Doing to Understanding: the value of Practitioner Enquiry

    The HMC Action Research Hub is a professional learning initiative run by HMC in partnership with the University of Warwick, with Dr Nomisha Kurian, Assistant Professor in Education Studies, as lead researcher. Over twelve months, teachers from HMC schools around the world are supported to design and carry out ethically robust, evidence-informed action research into…

  • HMC Aspiring Heads’ Programme

    I’m working through the final elements of the HMC Aspiring Heads’ Programme. Having had some time out due to surgery this past academic year, but journey on the programme was disrupted but thankfully I have been able to complete the activities and now I am reflecting on the journey in completing the portfolio. ‘There is…

  • What if the exam itself gatekeeps

    Reading the entry figures in Whittaker et al. (the 42% of schools no longer entering any pupils for GCSE Music, the 43% fall in A-level entries since 2011) I find myself thinking less about the headline numbers and more about what happens inside the qualification for the pupils who do get entered, because that’s the vantage point…

  • Reconceptualising the ecosystem: a response

    I’ve just read Whittaker, Anderson, Kinsella and Fautley’s recent paper in the British Journal of Music Education, (Re)conceptualising an integrated music education ecosystem in England, and I’ve been sitting with it for a while before writing anything down. Partly because the Birmingham group’s model is good (genuinely useful, generously offered, explicitly unfinished) and partly because I read…

  • From doing to understanding: the value of practitioner enquiry

    I had been working my way through Robin Alexander’s A Dialogic Teaching Companion as preparation for a research project. There’s a moment early on where he writes about dialogue being ‘the true foundation of teaching and learning’. I keep coming back to that, particularly as I think about the HMC Action Research Hub and what…

  • The Future of Teaching; Profession, Purpose, and Possibility

    The future of teaching is not primarily about technology. It is about the strength of the profession itself. There is a great deal of noise around education at the moment; particularly about artificial intelligence, about disruption, about transformation. And while some of that is important, I think there is a risk that we focus too…