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 back at the centre of schooling.” Ofsted’s old professional development materials talked about pupils experiencing, listening and responding to music without mentioning what they needed to know. Martin Fautley and John Finney were pushing back, arguing that music’s knowledge is inseparable from doing it.
Eight years on, that argument hasn’t gone away but it has been overtaken by events. What was once a staffroom debate about definitions has become policy. We now have a government-endorsed Model Music Curriculum, an official Ofsted framework that talks explicitly about “procedural” and “substantive” knowledge, a National Plan for Music Education running to 2030, and (as of November 2025) a root-and-branch Curriculum and Assessment Review that has finally scrapped the EBacc. The theoretical question I was wrestling with in 2018 is still worth asking, but it now sits inside a much more consequential set of practical battles: over curriculum time, teacher expertise, and who gets access to music at all.
This update keeps the core argument of the original – that in music, knowing and doing are very often the same act – but reframes it against where the debate has actually gone.
The theoretical argument still holds
My original claim was that musical knowledge is rarely just declarative. When a pupil sings, they’re drawing on knowledge of breath control, of how loudness feels in the body, of pitch and phrasing; none of which reduces neatly to a fact you could put on a flashcard. Fautley’s distinction still does the best job of capturing this: musical skill has a physical, embodied component that separates it from something like long division, where the “doing” is just the mechanical application of a fact you already know.
That distinction has, if anything, been formalised since 2018. Ofsted’s deep-dive reports on curriculum subjects now explicitly prioritise the methodical build-up of both procedural and substantive knowledge over time; official language for exactly the knowledge/skill entanglement Fautley and Finney were describing informally. The 2021 Ofsted Music Research Review and its 2023 follow-up, Striking the Right Note, both lean hard on this idea of incremental development: schools are told to “ensure there is enough curriculum time to develop musical knowledge and skills incrementally, and to treat performance, composition and listening as a single holistic curriculum” rather than three separate strands. Notably, that report also flags a persistent problem I only gestured at in 2018 – that “many primary teachers lack the musicianship and confidence to recognise real musical achievement in their pupils”, however well-sequenced the curriculum document looks on paper. Though I recognise that this is a problematic claim to be made, as it is something of a generalisation. Knowledge and skills can be married perfectly in a scheme of work and still fall apart in a classroom, if the person delivering it doesn’t have the skilful knowledge to hear whether it’s working, but this should not suggest ‘skilful knowledge’ comes from a music degree alone.
What’s actually changed: the debate went political
The bigger shift since 2018 isn’t in the theory, though, it’s in the policy weather. Three developments matter here.
First, government produced an answer. In March 2021 the Department for Education published a Model Music Curriculum, explicitly framed around “nurturing fundamental musical techniques alongside building musical knowledge”, organised around singing, listening, composing and performing. It was followed in June 2022 by a refreshed National Plan for Music Education, The Power of Music to Change Lives, running through to 2030 and centred on getting every school to timetable at least an hour of music a week. Where the 2018 debate was about whose definition of knowledge should win, government has since simply written its own synthesis into policy; for better or worse, “knowledgeable skills” is now closer to the official position than either side of the original argument.
Second, the money and time argument has eclipsed the definitional one. Ofsted’s 2023 subject report found real classroom strengths, but also flagged that “the curriculum too often focused on covering activities rather than ensuring the content was learned to a high standard” — a symptom of squeezed time rather than confused philosophy. Meanwhile in Parliament, MPs debating the future of music education in July 2025 were told that “music hub funding has been under real strain since the 2022 plan, with rising costs like pension contributions left uncovered despite an earlier government funding commitment”. When schools are fighting for the minutes and the money to teach music at all, “is this knowledge or is it a skill” starts to feel like a luxury question.
Third, and most significantly for anyone updating this piece now: in November 2025 the government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, led by Professor Becky Francis, recommended scrapping the EBacc performance measure entirely — the accountability tool that had spent fifteen years quietly squeezing arts subjects like music out of the timetable. The review’s own evidence was stark: “GCSE Music entries have fallen from around 7% of the cohort in 2009/10 to about 5%, and the gap in outcomes between disadvantaged pupils and their peers is now wider in music than in any other GCSE subject”. The government has accepted the recommendation. Campaigners who’d spent years arguing that EBacc accountability structurally disadvantaged the arts finally got their result.
This matters for the knowledge/skills debate because it reframes the stakes. In 2018 I was arguing, in effect, for a description of music education that did justice to how musicians actually learn. In 2026, the more urgent question is whether pupils get meaningful access to music at all; and a curriculum document that gets the knowledge/skills balance philosophically right is worth very little if EBacc pressure, funding cuts, or a shortage of specialist teachers mean the subject barely gets taught. Fautley has made a related point in his more recent writing, noting that debates about whose musical knowledge counts are entangled with questions about status, funding and whose musical practices the curriculum even recognises; the definitional argument and the resourcing argument were never really separable.
Revisiting notation, composition and instrumental playing
The three practical illustrations from the original piece still stand up well, and if anything the newer Ofsted guidance sharpens them (though I remain unconvinced this is a good thing).
Notation. Fautley’s point about “speaking” music rather than merely decoding it remains, to me, the clearest single illustration of why knowledge and skill can’t be prised apart in music: a pupil can correctly name every symbol on the stave and still be unable to recognise the tune they’ve just decoded. Ofsted’s subject report echoes this concern from the inspection side, warning that “weaker provision often prioritised covering musical activities over making sure pupils’ learning reached a genuinely high standard” — technically correct decoding without musical understanding.
Composition. My original argument – that composing requires both conventional knowledge (scales, chord construction, software navigation) and the metacognitive skill of evaluating your own developing idea – holds up, and connects neatly to the Curriculum and Assessment Review’s wider ambition to prepare pupils for a changing world, including the use of technology in creative subjects.
Playing an instrument. This is where the embodied argument is strongest, and where Ofsted’s 2023 findings add real weight: inspectors found that “fine motor skill development on an instrument takes considerable time, and that pupils given only shallow, rushed encounters with too many instruments ended up producing mechanistic, expressively flat music”. That’s not a skills deficit that more “knowledge” content could fix, nor a knowledge deficit that more drilling could fix on its own; it’s exactly the fused embodied knowledge I described in 2018, now backed by inspection evidence rather than just classroom experience.
Where I’d land the argument now
If I were writing this from scratch in 2026, I’d keep the central claim – that in music, the knowing and the doing are very often the same act – but I’d resist ending on the same note of “we need to find the balance.” That framing suited a 2018 debate that was still mostly about definitions. Today, the more useful question for a practising teacher is less “is this knowledge or skill?” and more: given a curriculum that finally has time protected (on paper, at least, now that EBacc pressure is lifting) and official recognition that musical learning is procedural as well as substantive, what does it actually take – in teacher expertise, curriculum time and instrumental access – to let pupils develop real musicianship rather than a thin, inspection-ready version of it?
The theory was never really the obstacle. The obstacle was, and largely still is, whether the system gives music the room to be taught properly.
References
Department for Education (2021) Model Music Curriculum: Key Stages 1 to 3.
Department for Education (2022) The Power of Music to Change Lives: A National Plan for Music Education.
Curriculum and Assessment Review (2025) Building a World-Class Curriculum for All: Final Report. Department for Education.
Fautley M (2017) Editorial: Notation and music education. British Journal of Music Education 34(2): 123–126.
Fautley M (2018) Editorial: Why music educators really understand skills. British Journal of Music Education 35(1): 1–4.
Finney J (2018a) Knowledge and creativity in conversation. Available at: jfin107.wordpress.com (accessed 2018).
Finney J (2018b) Schooling the musical mind. Available at: jfin107.wordpress.com (accessed 2018).
Gibb N (2017) The Importance of Knowledge-Based Education. Department for Education speech.
Ofsted (2021) Research Review Series: Music.
Ofsted (2023) Striking the Right Note: The Music Subject Report.
This is an updated version of an article originally published in Impact Journal, Issue 4: Designing a Curriculum, September 2018.
Steven Berryman 
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