#mufu2013 What I learned: Session 4 - Mark Phillips

Over the last week I have been blogging about the 2013 Musical Futures conference.

Mark Phillips

The last formal session of the first day was given by Mark Phillips, Ofsted HMI and national advisor for Music.

Ofsted have released a number of publications this last year, all available here. If you are a music teacher in any sector in the UK and have not already read these, I would urge you to stop reading this blog and read them now!

There has been a lot of open and frank discussion of these publications and Ofsted wider role on the teachingmusic forums. Again, if you have not signed up to this website do it now.

Meeting Mark confirmed what I had determined from the publications, he is a thoroughly decent and sensible chap, and makes excellent suggestions for how music ought to be taught. I still wonder about "rapid and sustained progress", and will come back to this in another blog post, but Mark was very clear about what he expected from music teachers, departments, schools and their wider partners.

If I could share only one thing from the session, it would be:

THERE ARE NO SUB-LEVELS IN MUSIC.

THERE ARE NO SUB-LEVELS IN MUSIC!

Let's stop for a mid-phrase appraisal. The first 3 notes were a 5c.

Joy of joys, the chosen one come to lead us to Zion! Except that in really it is not quite as simple as that as we all know. There was still much chagrin, in that Senior Management in many of our own schools and those we work with do not seem to be listening to Ofsted's recommendations. There are a number of accounts on the teachingmusic site of documents being placed in the hand of senior leadership and promptly ignored.

I understand the need to input sub-levels from a tracking point of view, but when they are arbitrary to the point that thousands of man hours are being lost across the country as heads of music departments are having to invent something to fit.

We do report sub-levels in our school, though thankfully only once a term. We have no criteria for what a 5c looks like in comparison to a 5a, we just use our best professional judgement based on how many of the statements in each of the NC levels ring true for our students and our SMT are happy to accept our judgement here. There are many inspirational heads up and down the country who talk about professional trust. I think of colossi like @johntomsett who, if his staff are not teaching in the afternoon, he trusts to go home, and do their work when it is best for them and their families. Yet many schools are run on fear (and it is easy to understand whY), and this is where much of Osfted/Gove-bashing is perpetrated. I an not suggesting that the system for inspection is perfect, nor would I suggest Sir Michael would pretend that is the case. But it is a case in point that despite very clear messages from Ofsted which you can read in  @oldandrewuk 's here, staff are still being told that learning outcomes must be shared, or discussed, or developed with the students. There does seem to be some impotency on Ofsted's part in terms of getting this message through to school management regimes.

I did ask the question to Mark: "Would Ofsted use an inspection report comment upon the effective of management, where school diktats were having a detrimental effect on music lessons?" The answer was pretty much no, but Mark was at pains to point just how much of a nonsense it was to spend 15 minutes of a one hour music talking about the music that you were going to make before you made it, which by the way is not appraising music. If I could sum up the rhetoric of "Wider Still, and Wider", it is that music lessons and music teaching and assessment should be musical and holistic.

Just a reminder...

THERE ARE NO SUB-LEVELS IN MUSIC!

Mark also made the valid point that if the excuse is in the interests of fairness and you want Music to report data in the same way as other subjects, then give us the same amount of contact time and let us see less kids.

The other main thrust of his presentation was to challenge the long entrenched inequalities in participation. I had hoped to share his presentation with you but trust me in saying that the statistics were not easy to read. Again there was some contest that this is not the case in all schools, and in fairness Mark recognised this, but on the grand scale, the least affluent students take part in music less than those from better off backgrounds, those who do not speak English as a first language take part in music less than.... You can see where I am going here, LAC, SEN, the same is true. This is something that we need to tackle as a community, and by that I mean all stakeholders in music education, Ofsted, senior management, hubs, teachers, parents, governors and government.

The last name there is important, in one of his better acts, Mr Gove has protected (albeit falling year on year) funding for music through the hubs for the next three years. But as Mark Phillips would ask "So What?"

What are we going to do with this money to make sure that Wider Opps, First Access, FSM and LAC remittance schemes have a lasting and musical legacy for our countries?

I don't have any answers or silver bullets. But I did have an extremely positive meeting with our hub leader, and members of our primary/secondary partnership last night which put the wheels in motion for our plans to address these issues.

What I do know at this moment in time is that Musical Futures has and continues to transform my department. As a means of giving all students access to music, valuing students' existing musical experiences and helping students to see themselves as musicians, this is the driving force of change and progress in our classrooms and practice rooms.

Oh, and one last thing:

THERE ARE NO SUB-LEVELS IN MUSIC!