Ben Turner interview: the music teacher bias

Stormzy, Dua Lipa or Aitch might not be the first artists who come to mind when you think of music lessons. Hattie Fisk speaks to director of music at East London Arts and Music (ELAM) and Rap Club founder Ben Turner, who believes the passions of each student should be reflected in their music lessons, whatever the genre.

Ben Turner watching Rap Club members perform at Wembley Stadium

One day, early on in Ben Turner's career when he was teaching in a school in Croydon, he reluctantly gave a Year 9 student a detention for disrupting his music class. During the detention, Turner asked the student what music they liked, provoking a surprising response. ‘The energy and excitement the student had about the music in comparison to about what I was teaching was massive, and it came from a student who was quite disengaged,’ recalls Turner. Despite the music in question being ‘quite violent drill music’, this sparked Turner to integrate new methods of learning into his detentions, bringing the interests and passions of his pupils into discussions and exercises.