This is a small and very readable book of some 78 pages. It is aimed firmly at the UK market, with a specific focus on England, though many of the ideas in this book will be suitable for a range of international contexts and situations. In many ways, the book’s brevity is one of its strengths. Anecdotally, we hear that heads of music in schools in England have very little time left for reading after the day job of teaching and learning, music making and the demands of a school-based position have eaten away at their time. Indeed, as the authors observe, ‘it can be very easy to overload yourself…’ (p. 62). To help with this issue, along with many others, the book offers sensible, down-to-earth suggestions, rooted in the quotidian ontologies of the contemporary classroom teacher.
The book is divided into eight chapters, each covering a different aspect of the role of the secondary music leader. What is useful about this book is that it does not shy away from presenting challenging questions but does so in a way which does not feel confrontational. For example, on p.13 it is noted that ‘…most of your students will finish their musical journey in school at the end of year 9, so it is really important not to base your impact around students gaining GCSE, A Level or other musical qualifications’. This is an important point. For many music leaders, success is gauged by exam group numbers, with the concomitant corollary that curricula for 11-year-olds are designed with this in mind. As numbers for GCSE music are falling (Bath et al., Reference BATH, DAUBNEY, MACKRILL and SPRUCE2020), and ‘…A-level music [is] a relatively exclusive qualification in the British educational landscape…’ (Whittaker, Reference WHITTAKER2021 p. 147), the advice here is a useful challenge for music leaders.
Challenging whilst supporting is a difficult manoeuvre to pull off, and yet as the authors clearly are speaking from experience, this helps considerably. Another example of a challenge is to be found in a discussion concerning music that children and young people produce in lessons:
You need to remember that music is an important component of young people’s sense of self-identity, and that the music that they listen to outside the classroom is likely to be much more sophisticated than the music that they can produce themselves in lessons. (p. 15)
This runs counter to the examples we see of children composing (a whole other topic), which even at the secondary level can sometimes restrict them to crotchets and quavers, and therefore the approach outlined in this book is very much to be welcomed.
There is a whole chapter devoted to ‘designing your curriculum’, which has useful information, including a helpful section on threshold concepts, the subject of a recent BJME article (Booth & Kinsella, Reference BOOTH and KINSELLA2022), but which does not always figure in teacher preparation literature or, indeed, constitute a topic which some classroom teachers might not be aware of. Threshold concepts are those things which need to be understood and grasped before children and young people can move on to the next stage of learning. There is another pithy observation in this section, which should be writ large in music teacher pre-service education and CPD: ‘Students can often be highly engaged in a musical activity but may simply be drawing on a pre-existing set of skills to produce more of the same…’ (p. 20).
Yet another key thinking point – certainly for UK-based teachers – is the observation that ‘Music is an aural-first artform but some approaches to music teaching have led to notation-first pedagogies’ (p. 31). Again, this is a helpful reminder for music teachers to think on, particularly in these times of problematic enrolment in optional and elective music classes in the upper secondary school. Too much in music teaching and learning that could be off-putting early on can be a problem, as the authors go on to observe:
Designing a curriculum that exposes students to different forms of notation and approaches to learning will be far more valuable to them and achieve better outcomes than trying to develop a curriculum built around increasingly fluent reading of staff notation (p. 31)
As with all music teaching and learning in England, there needs to be a section on classroom assessment; again, there is much useful information here. This reviewer has a long-term interest in this area and was pleased to see complex matters dealt with in a straightforward yet appropriate fashion, including the mention of formative, summative, diagnostic and evaluative assessment. From assessment the book makes a logical move to progression, and again, logical simplicity is the watchword here.
There then follow sections on supporting colleagues, defining the co-curricular programme, preparing for the role and creating a music development plan. There are also useful sections on supporting non-specialists to teach music, which is an increasing area of concern in England; reporting to non-specialist leadership teams, who may in many cases not have an understanding of what is going on in music classes; and managing visiting instrumental staff.
As a primer for busy music leaders, this is a helpful book. The fact that the authors have classroom knowledge and experience is both clear and to be welcomed. Although not intended as an academic work, it would have been helpful to consolidate the references contained within the text into a bibliography or reference section so that interested teachers can locate materials readily and find materials for further reading. However, it is appreciated that this is not the primary purpose of this book. All in all, this is a helpful and very readable publication, which should provide food for thought for classroom music teachers at all stages of their careers.
