Philip Flood interview: beyond 'youth voice' and 'challenging circumstances'

As the cost-of-living skyrockets, NHS mental health services receive record high numbers of referrals for children and young people, and more than 600,000 Ukrainian refugees – thousands of whom are children – attempt to make a life for themselves in the UK, it's a grim but unavoidable reality that many young people currently face significant barriers to accessing music education. The current crises aside, people have always faced challenges that reduce the accessibility of educational or cultural opportunities: learning difficulties, disabilities, mental illness, socioeconomic deprivation, crime, behavioural issues, displacement, homelessness – the list goes on.

Quite rightly, we often hear it insisted that every child and young person should be able to access high-quality music education – the vision of the new National Plan for Music Education is ‘to enable all children and young people to learn to sing, play an instrument and create music together, and have the opportunity to progress, including professionally’. In order to achieve the ‘all children’ part of this, the barriers must be removed. That doesn't mean waiting with bated breath for poverty and homelessness to be eradicated, or mental illnesses to be cured, but rather it means adapting, developing, and building upon our practices until the barriers become lower and lower, and are – in an ideal world – eventually imperceptible.