Have your say: letters to the editor, November 2023

Music education in England is in a parlous state. While the ACE-led music hub reorganisation is underway, recent reports by the ISM and others continue to highlight the decline of music education in many of England's schools. Against this backdrop, the announcement of £25 million funding for music instruments in September 2024 should be considered a welcomed investment. However, I have my concerns.

Chief among these is the flow of these monies. We are told that the new music hubs will receive a proportional share of this £25 million based on the number of young people in their newly constituted areas. The precise use of allocated funds will be determined by the leaders of these hubs. I suspect that many will use these funds to prioritise their own service offer to schools, equipping their organisation with new instrument stock. The problem is that these services are charged to schools, and many schools do not have the funding available to purchase them. Headteachers are often stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to decisions about their school budgets. Music provision is more often than not a casualty, not a beneficiary, in their decision making.