'Not enough music': a critique of music education in schools in England

This paper presents a critical overview of music education in schools in England, both generally and historically up to the end of 2019. It was decided early on that justice could not be done to all the nations of the UK - Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales - with their respective rich and important music cultures; neither could there be an international comparative analysis: while these two perspectives are important, it would have required a book rather than a monograph to fully explore these dimensions. This monograph was researched and written by me from late 2016 to late 2019. It started as a short article, maybe 3000 to 5000 words, for a journal, but as I read more, visited places and researched more deeply and widely, I realized that a short journal article would not do justice to the subject. I was also persuaded that the finished work should be written in accessible English and should reach a much wider readership than a narrowly academic journal article would allow. So it is now a research monograph, 29,000 words long and with over 100 references. I consider the current state of teaching and learning in music education by drawing on national and local research projects including online web research, observations, and visits to institutions, as well as on my own insights and experience. The visits included a variety of schools and colleges, interviews, and attendance at key conferences, along with phone conversations and personal discussions with people in music and music education, and extensive reading of major texts and reports. The monograph includes historical perspectives as well as considering the social, political and economic aspects of music education, including issues related to the substantial inequality in access to instrument learning and the variable quality of the reach and provision of music education in schools. It attempts to offer a balanced view, exploring the negative aspects but also featuring positive coverage of the many successful initiatives at local and national level, often promoted by schools, government policy, concert halls, universities and music colleges, music professional bodies, charities and other third sector organizations. It also seeks to explore and celebrate the many important manifestations of music in the public domain in England, as a background to questioning, along with music reports and professional organizations attached to the cultural and creative industries, why music education in schools has increasingly suffered underfunding, decreased provision and lowered status in the school curriculum, when England has such a world-renowned, diverse and rich music culture. Relevant developments and research on music and arts education at De Montfort University are also discussed and Dr Austin Griffiths, my colleague and member of the Education Studies staff, was invited to write a special analysis of elite music education based on his ongoing research

Contrasting approaches to preparedness: a reflection on two case studies

This chapter reflects on ongoing research in SMEs in the manufacturing and service sectors. It contrasts different approaches to the issue of preparedness from an organisational and social perspective, in two cases where new enterprise-wide business processes were implemented and integrated in different settings. In both cases, the emergence of new systems presented a huge challenge to companies hard-pressed to marshal the resources to mount effective change and implementation projects on this scale. The cases presented enable a comparison of different strategies used, one firm responding to organic growth, and the other to rapid industry-driven change. The chapter focuses not on the implementations per se, but instead on the issue of preparedness for change. The chapter concludes by drawing out general lessons concerning how to support and maintain organisational preparedness for enterprise wide change in different industry setting

The demands of users and the publishing world: printed or online, free or paid for?

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InfoInternet for Education in the Global South: A Study of Applications Enabled by Free Information-only Internet Access in Technologically Disadvantaged Areas (authors' version)

This paper summarises our work on studying educational applications enabled by the introduction of a new information layer called InfoInternet. This is an initiative to facilitate affordable access to internet based information in communities with network scarcity or economic problems from the Global South. InfoInternet develops both networking solutions as well as business and social models, together with actors like mobile operators and government organisations. In this paper we identify and describe characteristics of educational applications, their specific users, and learning environment. We are interested in applications that make the adoption of Internet faster, cheaper, and wider in such communities. When developing new applications (or adopting existing ones) for such constrained environments, this work acts as initial guidelines prior to field studies.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, under review for a journal since March 201

Mobilizing learning: mobile Web 2.0 scenarios in tertiary education

Based upon three years of mobile learning (mlearning) projects, a major implementation project has been developed for integrating the use of mobile web 2.0 tools across a variety of departments and courses in a tertiary education environment. A participatory action research methodology guides and informs the project. The project is based upon an explicit social constuctivist pedagogy, focusing on student collaboration, and the sharing and critique of student-generated content using freely available web 2.0 services. These include blogs, social networks, location aware (geotagged) image and video sharing, instant messaging, microblogging etc… Students and lecturers are provided with either an appropriate smartphone and/or a 3G capable netbook to use as their own for the duration of the project. Keys to the projects success are the level of pedagogical and technical support, and the level of integration of the tools into the courses – including assessment and lecturer modelling of the use of the tools. The projects are supported by an intentional community of practice model, with the researcher taking on the role of the “technology steward”. The paper outlines three different scenarios illustrating how this course integration is being achieved, establishing a transferable model of mobile web 2.0 integration and implementation. The goal is to facilitate a student-centred, collaborative, flexible, context-bridging learning environment that empowers students as content producers and learning context generators, guided by lecturers who effectively model th