MPEG – Making Music

The Borders Youth Music Forum has been going for a number a years under the project name SoundCycle. Funding and lockdown temporarily halted things for but we held a digital meeting this week via MS Teams to get the forum going again.

A good cross section of people attended representing music tutors and providers, venues, music organisations and brass bands.

We had input from Kelsey Jubin, Creative Learning Officer(YMI) at Creative Scotland, who talked to us about current funding opportunities. In summary the funds were the;

Targeted Fund for 20 key national organisations
Small Grants Fund for artist led activities, opening in January 2021
Youth Arts Access fund for individuals and organisations, with a deadline on the 12th of November.

Kelsey also highlighted the Nurturing Talent Fund overseen by Young Scot and a new Hardship Fund opening on the 26th of October. This was open to musicians, craft makers and visual artists and Kelsey suggested visiting the Help Musicians website for more details. https://www.helpmusicians.org.uk/

See this post for more details about these funds.

Mae Murray from MEPG (Music Education Partnership Group), talked about its priorities and the new activities it was undertaking. Its primary roles were to be an advocate for music education, increase opportunities and reduce inequalities, bring together music educators and relevant organisations and to support the sector through training and advice.

Mae highlighted a new report, to be released shortly, about the levels of aerosol release from singing and instrument playing. MEPG also runs a very active youth Forum which is led by the young people.

During lockdown MEPG ran several digital projects including Doorstep Samba, Over the Rainbow, and the Hey Jude, Sunday sessions. Mae then introduced the training sessions that MEPG are going to be delivering over the next few months and details of these will be sent out in a further email. They are all available through Eventbrite and on the new MEPG website www.wemakemusicscotland.org.

Thanks for everyone’s input and we will keep you posted about the next meeting.

In 2018 Creative Scotland commissioned The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, to undertake a major examination of music education and youth music-making in Scotland. Across a twelve-month period from early 2018 to early 2019. RCS took feedback and data from a wide range of organisations and individuals to examine the current state of music education and music making opportunities for young people. It looked at 3 varied case studies, examined the impact of YMI, the schools Instrumental Music Services and explored the formal, informal and non-formal sectors of music education in Scotland.

What’s Going On Now? built on the earlier research Whats Going On published in 2003 and examined the impact of the schools Instrumental Music Services. During the research, RCS reported to the Music Education Partnership Group, which includes representation across a wide and diverse range of partners.

There were many valid points highlighted in the report by those involved in teaching and delivering music education , such as “Bring it (music) back into the classroom in primary schools and watch the benefits spread across literacy, numeracy and social interaction.”

Some headline data included :

In 2016/17, around 244,000 young people took part in the Youth Music Initiative, with at least 202,000 taking part in school-based activity and at least 42,000 in out of school activity.
It was estimated that around 75,000 young people participated in music activities in the informal and non-formal sectors, an estimated increase of up to 50% since 2002-3.

Music Instrumental Services have been facing cuts in the last few years and in another of our posts we will look at the recent Parliamentary Group that looked in to this. In WGON it was noted that the average proportion of pupils receiving tuition has stayed roughly constant since 2002-3, at around 8-9%. This indicates, the report suggests, that the number of pupils receiving tuition is determined by the supply, not the demand.

Since 2003-4, the number of local authorities charging for instrumental music has risen from 15 to 25, and the average fee has risen from £102 to £220with the maximum fee increasing from £308 to £524. Around 19,000 pupils pay nothing.

The report made four significant recommendations to action:

To TACKLE inequalities in access to music provision
To CHANGE perceptions of music and its purpose
To REALISE THE POTENTIALof music in the school
To FURTHER FACILITATING Experiences and Opportunities

The YMI programme in the Borders is working with its partners and the community music groups to support improvements in all these four areas. These include Live Borders, the Music Instrument Service, SBC music teachers in our schools and the Borders Youth music Forum, Soundcycle. The full report and summary can be downloaded at the RCS website here.