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 it with a slightly different set of eyes to most people picking it up. I sat on the NPME2 expert panel. I was in the room, or at least in the orbit of the room, when some of the language this paper interrogates was being settled on.
What the evidence shows
It’s worth testing the ‘neoliberal-industrial’ reading of NPME2’s ecosystem language against what the evidence base for the creative industries themselves actually says, rather than just against the rhetoric of the document. I’m an evidence champion for the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Creative PEC), whose Creative Education, Skills and Talent theme produces exactly this kind of independent, ‘State of the Nations’ evidence for government and the sector. And what strikes me, reading Whittaker et al. alongside that body of work, is that the two aren’t in tension so much as talking past each other. NPME2 leans on the industry-pipeline framing as though feeding talent into creative careers were a relatively frictionless, meritocratic business once access exists. Creative PEC’s own research tells a much less comfortable story: lower-attaining students are disproportionately marginalised out of creative GCSE subjects including music, further education creative provision clusters heavily in a handful of urban centres, and the creative workforce itself remains less ethnically and socioeconomically diverse than the wider student population feeding into it.
That matters for how this paper’s model should be read, I think, because it means the ‘Contribution to wider music and cultural industries’ node the authors place in the outer ring of Figure 1 isn’t a neutral endpoint sitting quietly outside the young-person-centred core. The industries end of the pipeline actively reproduces the same inequities the model’s barrier boxes list on the right-hand side (geographical disparity, inequality of access) rather than sitting downstream of them as a separate concern. If NPME2’s ecosystem language is going to keep leaning on the industry-pipeline justification, it needs the industry-facing evidence base to be brought into the same conversation as the young-person-centred research this paper draws on, not treated as a separate, purely economic case for music education’s value. That’s the kind of connective work I’d love to see, and as far as I know, we’re not doing nearly enough of it yet.
The word itself
The authors note something I hadn’t quite clocked until they pointed it out: ‘ecosystem’ appears only three times in NPME2, and its most developed use ties the term directly to talent pipelines into the creative industries. Theatres need sound technicians, labels need lawyers, and so music education becomes the supply chain feeding a sector. Whittaker et al. read this as a fundamentally industrial framing dressed in ecological language, and they’re right that the metaphor does a lot of quiet work. An ecosystem implies balance, interdependence, even a kind of neutrality; nobody designed a rainforest. But NPME2’s ecosystem is very much designed, or at least intended to be steered, and steered partly towards economic outcomes rather than developmental ones.
What I do think is fair to say is that the panel’s conversations were fuller and more contested than three uses of one word could ever capture. Policy documents flatten. That’s not a defence so much as an observation; and it’s exactly the gap this paper is trying to fill, by going back to a decade of research with young people and providers rather than parsing the document’s own vocabulary.
Flipping governance for the young person
The move I like most in this paper is the explicit flip: rather than modelling the ecosystem as governance (hubs, plans, funding structures, the architecture people like me spend a lot of time thinking about) they put the young musician at the centre and ask what actually sits close to them, day to day. That’s a genuinely different question to the one an expert panel tends to ask, because a panel is, structurally, looking down at a system and trying to intervene in it. A young person is inside the system looking out, encountering a teacher, a hub-funded instrumental tutor, a local charity, without particularly caring what any of it is called or who funds it.
I’ve written before about wanting cultural education to resist being reduced to short-term projects and named schemes, and this paper gives me a sharper way of saying why: if a young person doesn’t experience the ‘project’ as a project, then organising a system’s self-understanding around projects is organising it around the wrong unit of analysis. Wider Opportunities under twenty different local names, some six weeks long and some a year, some free and some fee-paying, is the paper’s best illustration of this; the same policy intention producing wildly different lived experiences depending on where you happen to live. That’s not really an implementation detail. It’s the ecosystem’s actual texture, and a model has to be able to hold that variability without collapsing into it.
Where I’d push back gently, or at least ask for more, is on what the model does next. It’s honest about being descriptive rather than prescriptive, is-not-ought in the Humean sense they invoke, and I respect that restraint. But an expert panel doesn’t get to stay in ‘is’ for very long; sooner or later recommendations have to be written, funding formulas have to be defended, hub specifications have to be drafted. So my question back to Whittaker et al. would be: what would it take for a young-person-centred ecosystem model like this to actually discipline a policy document, rather than sit alongside it as a corrective read afterwards? Is that even the right job for the model to do, or is its value precisely in staying outside that machinery so to speak?
The SEND provocation
The section on inclusion for young people with SEND is, I think, the strongest part of the paper, and the line that’s stayed with me is the one from the AHRC provocation document: to feel included, you need to feel anticipated. That’s a genuinely useful reframe of what anticipatory practice means in a music education setting; not retrofitting access after a young person turns up and struggles, but designing the pathway as though they were always going to be there. The teacher testimony from the Uprising programme about the absence of disabled role models in classical music is a small quote doing a lot of work, and it connects to something I keep returning to in my own writing: representation in cultural education is not just about who gets access to provision but who a young person can imagine themselves becoming through it.
It also sharpens something the model risks understating elsewhere, which is how unevenly ‘proximity’ functions. The concentric-circles structure implies that the people and institutions closest to a young person are the most influential (which is true) but for a SEND learner, proximity can just as easily mean encountering more gatekeepers, not fewer, because more of the standard pathway requires accommodation before it becomes navigable at all. I’d be interested to see a version of the model that made friction, not just distance, visible.
School music as first contact, and as gatekeeper
The second provocation – school music’s declining place, the GCSE and A-level entry figures, the KS3 curriculum time being quietly squeezed out from underneath music departments – is grim reading, but not unfamiliar reading if you’ve spent any time in this sector over the last decade. What the ecosystem framing adds, I think, is a way of saying precisely why this matters beyond the department itself: when school music narrows, it doesn’t just shrink one node in the system, it fractures a pipeline, because school is very often the point of first contact the rest of the ecosystem assumes has already happened. Hubs, out-of-school providers, conservatoires; a great deal of what they do presupposes a level of prior exposure that an increasing number of young people simply won’t have had by the time they meet it.
That’s the argument I’d want to carry into any future conversation about a plan for music, arts and cultural education more broadly, which I’ve written about before: a plan that treats school provision and out-of-school provision as separate conversations, run on separate timelines with separate funding logics, will keep reproducing exactly the disjuncture this paper describes.
The enrichment framework, and a centre that’s gone quiet
Two developments since this paper went to press are worth reading straight into Figure 1’s left-hand column, alongside NPME2, the National Curriculum and the Model Music Curriculum, because both sit exactly in that contextual territory the model is trying to capture.
The first is the DfE’s enrichment framework, published this year to help schools design a ‘high-quality enrichment offer’. It’s non-statutory, but Ofsted will have regard to it from September, which in practice means it isn’t really optional at all; schools respond to what inspection frameworks reward. Arts and culture is one strand among several, sitting alongside civic engagement and outdoor and adventurous activity. I understand the instinct to fold music into a broader entitlement to enrichment rather than leaving it isolated, and there’s something in the spirit of that which chimes with this paper’s insistence that music education shouldn’t be understood as a silo. But I’d want to flag the risk too: when music becomes one line item within a generic enrichment offer rather than a curriculum entitlement in its own right, it becomes easier for a stretched school to discharge the requirement through whatever’s cheapest or most convenient to timetable, rather than through the kind of sustained, relationship-based partnership work I’ve just been describing. Enrichment framed generically is exactly the kind of contextual factor that can widen, rather than narrow, the postcode lottery the authors describe.
The second is the National Centre for Arts and Music Education itself, which sits even more directly in that outer ring of the model, the ‘National Cultural Landscape’ the authors place around the industry bodies, HEIs and conservatoires. It was announced back in March 2025, with a clear intention: a single, credible national body that would take over fundholding for the Music Hubs network from Arts Council England, coordinate CPD, and act as a strategic system leader for arts education. The tender finally went out in February this year, worth £13 million over three years, and bidding closed at the end of April. And then, as I write this, it has gone rather quiet. The procurement process has slipped; DfE has acknowledged a delay and apologised to those who’d expressed interest, without giving a firm date for a contract award, even as the Centre is still nominally due to open this September. Hub fundholding transfer has itself already been pushed back a year, to September 2027, partly because of this.
I raise it here because it’s such a clean illustration of the gap this paper is trying to name between a policy document’s ecosystem and a lived one. On paper, the Centre is meant to be the thing that makes the outer rings of Figure 1 legible and navigable; the coordinating body that turns a scattered “wide ecosystem” into something an individual school leader, hub, or young person can actually orient themselves by. In practice, months after bids closed, nobody outside DfE knows who’s running it, and schools are being asked to build their enrichment offers and plan next year’s partnerships against a governance structure that doesn’t yet functionally exist. That’s not a criticism of any individual civil servant working hard on a difficult procurement; it’s a comment on how much weight the ecosystem metaphor is being asked to carry at exactly the moment its central coordinating institution is in limbo.
Leadership as the hinge
There’s one thing the paper names but, I think, slightly underplays, and it’s the one I keep coming back to from my own vantage point as a trustee of both Music Masters and Spitalfields Music: how much of what happens in this ecosystem turns on the relationship between a specialist provider and a school’s senior leadership, rather than between the provider and the music department alone. Whittaker et al. are clear that “a few key individuals” carry disproportionate weight in a young person’s musical journey, and their SEND section rightly stresses the music teacher’s role in that. But sitting on both boards, what I see repeatedly is that the decisive relationship often sits one level up from the classroom; with a headteacher or a MAT-level leader who decides whether a partnership gets curriculum time, whether it survives a budget round, whether it’s treated as core provision or as an enrichment extra that can be quietly dropped when things get tight.
That matters for how we read the model, because it suggests the key individuals layer isn’t flat. A brilliant, committed music teacher can be undone by a leadership team that doesn’t understand (or hasn’t been brought into) what a partnership like Music Masters’ primary instrumental work, or Spitalfields Music’s community and composing programmes, is actually trying to build over several years rather than one. Conversely, the partnerships I’ve seen work best and last longest are the ones where a head or a trust CEO has become a genuine advocate, not just a signatory to a grant agreement. That’s a leadership relationship as much as an educational one, and it’s built through the same slow, unglamorous work of trust and reputation that any long-term relationship needs; not something a hub specification or a funding cycle can manufacture on demand.
I don’t think this contradicts the paper’s model so much as it asks for another layer of texture within it: alongside the teachers and hub leads already pictured close to the young person, there’s a largely invisible layer of senior leadership decision-making that determines whether those closer relationships are even permitted to form and persist. If schools are, as the authors argue, both provider and gatekeeper, then it’s worth being precise about who inside a school is doing the gatekeeping; because in my experience it’s very often not the person actually teaching the music.
Where I land
I don’t think this model is the last word, and to their credit, neither do the authors. But it does something an expert panel process structurally struggles to do: it starts from testimony rather than from the shape policy documents already assume the system should have. That’s a hard discipline to hold onto once you’re inside the machinery of writing recommendations, and I think this paper is, among other things, a useful provocation to anyone who has been.
A few questions I’m left with, and would genuinely like other people’s views on:
If a national plan were built outward from this concentric, young-person-centred model rather than from hub structures and funding architecture, what would actually have to change first?
Does ‘proximity’ in the model need a companion concept (friction, or gatekeeping) to properly represent how unevenly accessible the inner circles are for different young people?
Can an expert panel process ever produce a document written in these terms, or is the value of this kind of model precisely that it sits outside, and in tension with, that process?
What would it take to bring the industry-facing evidence base (the kind Creative PEC produces on skills, access and diversity in the creative workforce) into direct conversation with young-person-centred research like BMERG’s, rather than letting the industry ecosystem and the learner ecosystem run as parallel, rarely-cross-referenced justifications for the same policy?
And for those of us who’ve sat on the inside of policy expert panels: how do we bring research like this back into the room next time, rather than reading it appreciatively after the fact?
If senior leadership relationships are so often the hinge on which a partnership’s survival turns, should a model of the ecosystem represent that layer explicitly; and what would it take for hub and funding structures to actually invest in building it, rather than assuming it as a background condition?
And what does it do to a school leader’s willingness to commit to a long-term partnership when the body meant to coordinate the whole outer ring of the ecosystem (the National Centre) is itself unresolved months after bidding closed? Can a model like this represent institutional uncertainty at the macro level as a live variable, rather than treating the outer rings as a stable backdrop to the young person at the centre?
Steven Berryman 
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