Features

Guildhall's Jonathan Vaughan: forging meaningful local alliances

Principal of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama since 2022, Jonathan Vaughan reflects on the performing arts, the role of educators and how we can build a better, more collaborative future.
© Guildhall School / Paul Cochrane

For most of my 40-year career I've harboured an optimism that one day we will have a government in the UK which has the vision, foresight and determination to organise and fund music education at a level that would enable every child in the country to have access to instrumental lessons. Having spent hours talking to MPs and attending cross-party debates, I am now certain that that is not going to happen in my lifetime – no matter who is in power. The cavalry is not coming over the hill to save music education.

Our industry is under more pressure than ever before, as a result of funding challenges and political scrutiny. There are of course pockets of extraordinary work, but on a national scale our infrastructures are now so patchy, fractured and dysfunctional that they have virtually no structural integrity or coherence. As a nation we are failing our young people in the performing arts.

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