How music can support local authority agendas

The government’s National Plan for Music Education (2011, 2022) requires local music services to form music education hubs and partnerships to provide a more diverse offer of learning as standard. My work at Hertfordshire Music Service (HMS) demonstrates the mutual value of including local authorities (LAs) as key hub partners.

Music services originated as music animateurs, employed by county councils to coordinate musical activity to raise morale during World War 2. In peacetime, they were asked to form early music services, which began during a post-war flourishing of social democracy in parallel with the nascent National Health Service. 

For many, this translated into defining inclusion as offering free access to formal music-making. Although admirable, this overlooked the personal and social outcomes previously associated with informal arts and culture.

Hertfordshire’s reputation as a national leader for musical inclusion dates from 2003, when director John Witchell used the Standards Fund to establish a small team to diversify the music service’s practices and engagement. The team’s knowledge of local informal music infrastructure helped source local musicians to retrain as workshop leaders; a rap workshop proved particularly successful. 

This and other creative/informal workshops quickly demonstrated additional purposes for learning music beyond the progression through graded exams and ensembles traditionally associated with such services. Their potential to engage hard to reach groups soon caught the attention of local authority support teams.

Benefits for targeted support teams

Rap and song-writing workshops were commissioned as part of Hertfordshire County Council (HCC)-led initiatives, such as anti-bullying campaigns. Funding from Youth Music, district council arts officers, councillors’ locality budgets and partnerships with the local authority Youth Connexions team helped HMS to offer diversionary workshops during holidays and evenings. Youth Connexions also hosted the HMS inclusion team office at Bowes Lyon Youth Club in Stevenage, which in turn helped to establish monthly gigs to increase its engagement of young people. 

After seeing the team jamming at a conference, an HCC community education officer commissioned a series of family music workshops targeted at fathers, a traditionally hard to engage group. ‘Dust off your Stratocaster and join our Family Jam!’ was the strapline of one early workshop series. 

Family Djembe, Gospel Singing, Guitar and Taiko workshops swiftly followed, commissioned by the HCC Adult and Community Learning team looking for new ways to improve family support of vulnerable pupils’ learning. Community musicians and HMS First Access tutors took care to model a ‘having a go’ ethic to encourage parents to show their children how to rise to a challenge. 

Schools reported how effectively music engaged families that hadn’t responded to more formal invitations. “I wish I’d tried using music ages ago!” commented one primary school headteacher. 

Family Music was picked up by the nascent Extended Schools projects, resulting in extensive family music projects in Hatfield and Hertford. An annual contract with the HCC Adult and Community Learning team helped to establish schemes of work for four- and six-weeks workshop series in schools, music centres and community settings. It also linked HMS into a Hertfordshire-wide network of community learning providers, resulting in community music workshops for adult mental-health service users, in partnership with Mind and Turning Point.

Partnership work with mental health workers resulted in innovative intergenerational music models. A mental health nurse, working with elderly service users, commented how her patients’ rich life experience could benefit children at risk of exclusion. HMS devised a workshop programme wherein young people wrote songs based on the reminiscences of elders. This has run in several iterations. 

The reminiscences of a Windrush generation woman inspired a group of primary school pupils to write a rap which was performed at the Rhythm of the World Festival in Hitchin. Songs based on reminiscences from elders in eight primary schools were performed at Hertford Castle Hall during the Hertford Extended school project. 

The Music for a Generation project, commissioned by the HCC Community Wellbeing Team in 2011, included reminiscence work and performances in day centres by school children; some of whom were at risk of exclusion. 

Interested to include culture within its ‘ageing well’ strategy, East Herts District Council funded Musical Memory Box, an intergenerational song-writing project in day centres in Hertford. As part of this, community musicians trained music students from Hertford Regional College, one of whom joined the HMS informal music team.

Benefits for music services

In each of these projects, music has offered extra value to social inclusion agendas. In return, the partnerships have helped HMS to broaden its engagement, with some participants progressing from youth club workshops to performing at the biennial HMS gala at the Royal Albert Hall.

Most significantly, the partnerships have suggested wider purposes for music services. In 2010, funding from Youth Music and developing partnerships with secondary school SENCOs helped HMS to pilot a music-based mentoring model in which instrumental music teachers supported pupils at risk of school exclusion. 

In later iterations this developed into trauma-informed creative musical nurture groups delivered by instrumental music teachers in primary schools to address causes of school exclusion at an early stage. 

This work is still in its infancy, but the models continue to attract much interest nationally, and have potential to contribute much to local and district councils’ lifelong inclusion and preventative health strategies.

Dr Michael Davidson, Head of Rock, Family and Community Music, Hertfordshire Music Service, and Programme Lead, Changing Tracks.
 changingtracks.org.uk | hertsmusicservice.org.uk 
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