Cofnod y
Trafodion
The
Record of Proceedings
Y Pwyllgor Diwylliant, y Gymraeg a Chyfathrebu
The Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee
Agenda’r Cyfarfod
Meeting
Agenda
Trawsgrifiadau’r Pwyllgor
Committee
Transcripts
Cynnwys
Contents
.........
Cofnodir y trafodion yn yr iaith y llefarwyd hwy ynddi yn y pwyllgor. Yn ogystal, cynhwysir trawsgrifiad o’r cyfieithu ar y pryd. Lle y mae cyfranwyr wedi darparu cywiriadau i’w tystiolaeth, nodir y rheini yn y trawsgrifiad.
The proceedings are reported in the language in which they were spoken in the committee. In addition, a transcription of the simultaneous interpretation is included. Where contributors have supplied corrections to their evidence, these are noted in the transcript.
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Aelodau’r pwyllgor yn
bresennol
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Hannah Blythyn |
Llafur
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Dawn Bowden |
Llafur
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Suzy Davies |
Ceidwadwyr Cymreig |
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Bethan Jenkins |
Plaid Cymru (Cadeirydd y Pwyllgor) |
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Dai Lloyd |
Plaid Cymru |
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Lee Waters |
Llafur
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Eraill yn bresennol
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Elinor Bennett |
Is-Gadeirydd Bwrdd y Cyfarwyddwyr, Gwasanaeth
Ysgolion William Mathias |
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Richard Hallam |
Cadeirydd y Cyngor Addysg Gerddoriaeth; Cadeirydd y
Cyngor Cyswllt Cenedlaethol / Aelod o’r Bwrdd Gweithredol, Y
Gymdeithas Ryngwladol Addysg Gerddoriaeth |
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Gareth Kirby |
Cydgysylltydd y Gwasanaeth Cerdd, Gwasanaeth Cerdd
Sir Gaerfyrddin |
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Ann Pritchard Jones |
Rheolwr Gwasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias
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Swyddogion Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru yn
bresennol
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Siân Hughes |
Y Gwasanaeth
Ymchwil |
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Rhea James |
Dirprwy Glerc |
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Adam Vaughan |
Clerc
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Dechreuodd y cyfarfod am
09:02.
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Cyflwyniad, Ymddiheuriadau, Dirprwyon a Datgan
Buddiannau |
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[1] Bethan Jenkins: Croeso i’r Pwyllgor Diwylliant, y Gymraeg a Chyfathrebu. Mae ymddiheuriadau gennym ni gan Neil Hamilton y bore yma, ac nid oes dirprwyon, yn ôl beth rwy’n ei ddeall. Croeso i aelodau’r pwyllgor. Os bydd larwm tân, dylai pawb adael yr ystafell drwy’r allanfeydd tân penodol a dilyn cyfarwyddiadau’r tywyswyr a’r staff. Ni ddisgwylir prawf heddiw. Dylai pawb droi eu ffonau symudol i fod ar dawel. Rydym ni’n gweithredu’n ddwyieithog, ac mae clustffonau ar gael i glywed y cyfieithiad ar y pryd ac i addasu’r sain ar gyfer pobl sy’n drwm eu clyw.
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Bethan Jenkins: Welcome to the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee. We have apologies from Neil Hamilton this morning, and there are no substitutes, as I understand it. Welcome to committee members. If there is a fire alarm, please leave the room via the specific exits and follow the directions of the ushers and the staff. We are not expecting a fire alarm test today. Please put your phones on silent. We do operate bilingually. There are headphones available to hear the translation and also for amplification.
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[2] The translation is on channel 1 and you can put the sound up on channel 0.
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[3] Nid oes angen cyffwrdd â’r botymau ar y meicroffonau gan y gall hynny amharu ar y system sain, a gofalwch fod y golau coch ymlaen cyn dechrau siarad. |
You don’t need to touch the buttons on the microphones as this could upset our sound system, and please make sure the red light is on before you begin to speak.
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[4] A oes unrhyw ddatganiadau o fuddiannau gan Aelodau ar hyn o bryd? Na.
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Are there any declarations of interest? No. |
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Cyllid ar gyfer Addysg Cerddoriaeth a
Mynediad at yr Addysg Honno: Sesiwn Dystiolaeth Ragarweiniol
4
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[5] Bethan Jenkins: Eitem 2: rydym ni’n symud ymlaen at ariannu addysg gerddoriaeth a gwella mynediad ato a’r sesiwn dystiolaeth ragarweiniol 4. Rydym ni’n croesawu Richard Hallam, sef cadeirydd y Cyngor Addysg Cerddoriaeth, cadeirydd y Cyngor Cyswllt Cenedlaethol, ac aelod o fwrdd gweithredol y Gymdeithas Ryngwladol Addysg Gerddoriaeth—teitl digon hir fanna. Diolch i chi am ddod yma heddiw.
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Bethan Jenkins: Item 2: we are moving on to the funding of music education and access to music education and preliminary evidence session 4. We welcome Richard Hallam, chair of the Music Education Council, chair of the National Affiliate Council, and executive board member of the International Society for Music Education—a nice long title there. Thank you for coming here today.
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[6] Welcome and thank you for coming today.
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[7] Yn amlwg, mae diddordeb gyda ni i ddeall beth sydd yn digwydd yn Lloegr, yn y cyd-destun Prydeinig, i ddeall sut, efallai, mae Cymru yn gallu dysgu o’r hyn rydych chi’n ei wneud, neu addasu’r hyn rydych chi’n ei wneud yn Lloegr. Ond, yn gyntaf, tybed a oes unrhyw sylwadau gennych chi, yng nghyd-destun y ffaith bod Owain Arwel Hughes wedi dweud bod yna argyfwng, bod yna grisis, yn digwydd ym myd cerddoriaeth yma yng Nghymru. A oes gennych chi'r un fath o bryder yn Lloegr, neu ydy hynny wedi cael ei wella gan y newidiadau yna’n ddiweddar?
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Clearly, we are interested in understanding what’s happening in England, in the British context, to understand how maybe Wales can learn from what you’re doing and maybe adapt what you’re doing in England. But, first of all, perhaps, do you have any opening remarks, in the context of the fact that Owain Arwel Hughes has said that there is a crisis in the music world here in Wales? Do you have the same sort of concerns in England, or have you seen improvements because of the changes made there recently? |
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[8] Mr Hallam: Certainly, what we’re picking up is a great concern about the future, and that things are in a concerned state in terms of access for young people to music education and to instrumental learning, and ensembles in particular. And it’s quite an important one, because of the lead time in learning an instrument from beginning through to excellence. And, so, if we’re beginning to see some problems, they might be the result of the last three, four, five years. And, so, urgent action, I think, is needed.
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[9] Bethan Jenkins: And have you seen a development since the report has been announced in England on the national strategy?
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[10] Mr Hallam: Yes. As you will know better than myself, policies are absolutely great and we think we’ve got a very good policy and a very good enabling policy that should work out very, very well. There’s always a balance and a challenge between the policy and getting it implemented, so that on the ground—the things that people like you make available and possible to us, so that colleagues can deliver on the ground. That’s always a slow process.
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[11] So, there are good things happening. There are positive outcomes from what’s happening in England and in Scotland. Northern Ireland is going through some more difficulties, obviously, because they’re trying to amalgamate into one service—there are six library boards going into one. But in England, yes, my feeling is that policy is working and is going in the right direction, but it’s far from perfect and it’s frustratingly slow sometimes.
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[12]
Bethan Jenkins:
Jest i’n helpu ni, a allwch chi
ddisgrifio beth sydd yn digwydd yn dda yn Lloegr a beth yw’r
problemau, fel ein bod ni’n deall beth sydd yn weithredol ar
lawr gwlad? |
Bethan Jenkins: Just to help us, could you describe what is being done well in England and what the problems are, so that we can understand what is done at grass-roots level?
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[13] Mr Hallam: Yes. I think probably it may help—stop me if this is too much detail, but the essential thing to hang on to is that music education is complex. It’s very multifaceted and it has lots of bits of ingredients and when they’re all working brilliantly together, then that’s absolutely fine and it really works best. We have, I believe, in the UK—in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—one of the best opportunities and systems in place across the world. So, it’s absolutely great in terms of its potential, but the bits need to work together. Essentially, that’s where the notion of the hubs and things came from.
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[14] I suppose I can best illustrate it in a personal way: my son is a physics research fellow at Cranfield University. He decided to go into physics and he went through the school physics lessons to university, to his Master’s and to his doctorate and he didn’t need to do anything outside those timetabled school lessons. I don’t know anybody who goes into music, who can do that just on their school lessons. So, there’s this whole infrastructure.
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[15] The second complexity is around the fact that music is both a benefit and a problem, which comes with it. Music does so much good and can reach so many different parts that it can have the personal impact, the social impact, and it can have the educational impact; it can be music for leisure, it can be music for a career; it can help in health. It can do all those things, but music in and of itself doesn’t do all of those things. If you want it to help in health, you need a certain side thing. If you want to help socially, then you’re not talking about having lessons on your own—that’s part of the group and music-making is part of that.
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[16] So, you’ve got these complexities and Donaldson has come up with his expressive arts curriculum and that’s absolutely great. So, that will pick up and resolve for Wales what you’re doing in schools, but schools can’t do it on their own and no matter how good that curriculum is—and music is one of the expressive arts—and no matter how good that is and that it works, in and of itself, that is not going to be enough for that aspect. So, then you have the whole infrastructure of instrumental tuition and ensemble. Some of those will be like brass bands. So, in a community, you’ll have private teachers, but again, that just leaves the whole thing to chance in terms of who’s there and individuals in certain areas. What the music services do is bring a coherent structure to that across the local authorities, which enables us, to some extent, to start giving greater access and fairness and making it more equitable across the piece. So, that is instrumental and vocal tuition and ensemble, if we think of it in those ways.
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[17] An essential contribution, again, is from professional musicians and artists, so you have the Arts Council of Wales input and the work that they’re doing for you. That, again, is enormously helpful because the inspiration and motivation from either a one-off project or a six-week project that might go on in the schools establishment are all part of the overall ecology of what’s happening. But, the professional artists can’t necessarily do the weekly violin lessons, or the harp lessons, or the trumpet lessons because they’ve got other things to do. It’s further complicated because many of the professional artists will teach at the conservatoires and many of the people who teach in the infrastructure are also practicing musicians—they might actually conduct the local brass band because they are there with a full-time job and they contribute to the community. So, you’ve got all of this interweaving complexity that we need to take account of.
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[18] Finally, if we’re thinking about music, it would be wrong not to mention that of course some children and young people can do it on their own. They go onto the internet, they’ll learn to play guitar, and they’ll do other things. That is another routine, but again, that’s down to individual choice.
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[19] What music services in the UK have done—and that means very much in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland—we’ve done it differently from other parts, internationally—other countries across the world—in how we’ve done it. So, all of that makes an enormous difference in terms of what we’ve done. By going into schools—and music services are pretty well in every school across the country—you have these experts on instruments, the expert musicians, being able to come in and provide some tuition that is at least accessible to every child who might want to learn. Obviously, we can go into it later about finances and the barriers that stop some children learning, but in principle, you’ve got the presence there, which makes it easier, structurally, for people to take part and to engage. Let me pause there.
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[20] Bethan Jenkins: Dai, a oeddet ti eisiau gofyn cwestiwn?
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Bethan Jenkins: Dai, did you want to ask a question?
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[21] Dai Lloyd: Diolch, Gadeirydd. Fel rydych chi newydd ei amlinellu, mae’r sefyllfa yn gymhleth, onid yw? Ond o’n hochr ni, fel rhan o’r adolygiad yma, rydym eisiau gwybod yn union—i lawr i’r manylion—beth sydd yn mynd ymlaen yn Lloegr, ac o’ch profiad chi. Hefyd, rydym eisiau rhyw fath o argraff o—. Rydym eisiau gwasanaeth cynhwysfawr i blant i gael derbyn cerddoriaeth ar draws y bwrdd, felly, gan gynnwys y plant hynny sydd o gefndir incwm isel. Felly, a allwch chi adlewyrchu’r math o gefnogaeth sydd iddyn nhw? Ac hefyd, ar y llaw arall, pa gefnogaeth sydd ar gael i’r disgyblion hynny sydd â thalent go iawn ac sydd angen mwy o gymorth, efallai, neu i fod yn fwy heriol? Felly, mae yna ddwy ran, fel yr ydych wedi’i amlinellu eisoes: gwneud yn siŵr bod ein disgyblion ni i gyd o leiaf yn cael blas ar ddysgu cerddoriaeth, ond hefyd—. So, pa gefnogaeth sydd i hynny? Hefyd, pa gefnogaeth sydd i’r disgyblion talentog hynny sydd, efallai, yn mynd ymlaen ac yn cyrraedd y brig? Ac hefyd, rhyw argraff o sut rydych yn gweithredu rhyw fath o gronfa ddata o le mae’r offerynnau cerdd yn bod. Mae yna ddiffygion, yn aml, wrth jest cael gafael mewn offeryn i’w chwarae. Felly, sut y mae’r rheini i gyd yn gwau eu ffordd i mewn? Rwy’n deall ei fod yn gymhleth. Rydych newydd amlinellu ei fod yn gymhleth. Ymddiheuriadau hefyd gan fod y cwestiwn hwn braidd yn gymhleth hefyd, ond dyna ni.
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Dai Lloyd: Thank you, Chair. As you’ve just said, the situation is complex, of course. But looking at it from our side, as part of this review, what we’d like to know is—in detail, perhaps—what’s happening in England, in your experience. Also, we would like some sort of impression of—. We want a comprehensive service for children to have music lessons across the board, including those children from a low-income background. Could you tell us what sort of support there is for them? Also, on the other hand, what support is there for those pupils who are talented and need more help perhaps, or maybe should be challenged more? So, there are two parts there, as you’ve already said: making sure that all our pupils at least have a taste of learning music, but also—. What support is there for that? And what support is there for those pupils who are very talented and maybe will get to the top in the music world? How, perhaps, do you operate some sort of database of where your instruments are located? You know, there are some problems maybe with just getting hold of instruments sometimes, aren’t there? So, how does that all come together? I know it’s complex. You’ve just told us that. I do apologise also because this question is also a little complicated, but there we are.
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[22] Mr Hallam: Not at all. Do interrupt me and bring me back; otherwise I’ll go on, and I might go off the point. My intention is to be helpful. Contextually, what happened in England was what is happening in Wales, I think, in that we had some music services closing. It was an unintentional by-product of other legislation. Music tends to punch above its weight because it reaches us in our hearts. It’s what we care about. So, it punches above its weight, but obviously it doesn’t punch so far above its weight that, if there’s a more general educational policy that doesn’t quite fit, then we’re not going to win that one.
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[23] Back in the 1980s and 1990s within England, there was local management of schools, various issues, which created a problem for local authorities about retaining money to support music services. They were under pressure, financially, as I’m sure that you will recognise. Having had several music services close, then the Government stepped in and said, ‘We’ll have a grant’, and they gave an across-the-board grant, and then various other mechanisms. They tried match-funding for a while and various mechanisms, but a grant was established in 1999. In 2001, David Blunkett said that he wanted, over time, every child to have this opportunity. I became Government adviser on a part-time secondment for two days a week from being a head of a service in 2003. That’s when I chaired the Music Manifesto steering group. What happened there is that we looked at what was going on, and came up with it and all the access points that you’ve mentioned and where the funding was coming from and the differences of funding. Again, like in Wales, we had 152 local authorities, but in order to survive through the 1980s and 1990s, we’d already developed quite a lot of individual local things. So, there was no coherence about what was going on.
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[24] The appetite in England was both to do with demographics and various make-ups of the different constituencies that local pride and local valuing of music services and what they did—often referred to as jewels in the crown, some of the ensembles there, and those sorts of things, and quite rightly so—meant that it was important to retain an element of local identity within a national, more equitable structure. So, the Government came up with funding and a plan, which it basically tried to accommodate. So, local authorities could still put in funding, they could still support premises and things like that, if they wished, but there was a baseline grant to try and make sure that something would continue.
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09:15
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[25] As a result of that, where they had disappeared they were re-established, and over time—I can let people have details of the funding if they want—in 2008, before the economic down-turn, we actually moved through pilots and various things to a policy where we had £300 million. The year 2007 was when we also introduced further guidelines on charging—every school in England, and I believe it’s the same in Wales, has to have a remissions policy across the board for all school trips and things like that, and music was part of that—which basically said that your decisions should be taken on music and educational grounds, and the concept of every child having initial access was built into the plan.
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[26] As I say, we went through various amounts of money; we kept it going through the economic down-turn and I was kept on through the change of Government to the coalition; the coalition Government had the Henley review, which I participated in as well, and all of that resulted in an allocation and a redistribution of the funds on a per pupil basis, per local authority. So, within our local authorities there’s a total grant now of £75 million, which I understand equates to around the £5 million mark in Wales as a per pupil number, but £75 million for us means that every local authority area gets a per capita basis. Again, this is detail that we can go into at some other time, but we looked at a whole set of things like rural deprivation for places like Cumbria, North Yorkshire, we looked at Northumberland as well, we looked at special educational needs, we looked at free school meals and those sorts of things. In England, schools get a people premium, so schools can draw on that as well, and in the end our formula is 90 per cent on pupil population, and 10 per cent weighting for free school meals. So, that is a step towards trying to make sure that access is there.
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[27] You mentioned instruments, so just touching on that briefly. When we had the £300 million from 2008-11—£100 million a year—to try and roll out various pilots so that every child could have an initial taster—. Perhaps, before I go on to instruments, I’ll just mention that instrument taster. I was lucky, I have two parents who were together until they passed on, so I had a very stable background. My father was a milkman and my mother worked in a hosiery factory, and I started with a brass band in a local village and then went on to a music service that took me through the rest of my career. But, basically, all of that was possible through that support. A lot of children, for whom music can really change their lives and be the one thing that’s going to make them work, may not have that support at home. They might have a single parent, they may have drugs, they might be carers, there’s all sorts of things, and there might be no tradition of music. So, although there was no tradition in my family, my parents were supportive and they valued education. What we tried to do with our access policy was to try and say, ‘You need long enough for parents whose children care about what they’re doing, who want to see that—’. There are all sorts of spin-offs, like parents coming into schools and engaging more and, again, we can get into a whole host of other stuff, but essentially you need a long enough programme that they’re going to say, ‘My child is interested in this, they like doing this, they’re finding this enjoyable, I will support them.’ Then a remissions policy after a free access period—a remissions policy afterwards—and the second of our criteria for the plan, is that clear progression routes should be available and affordable. Again, you’ll recognise why those words are chosen in the way they are, because we recognise there’s no way it could be free for everybody for ever in the current climate, and some parents are more than happy to pay because they see what it does for their children, as much as they can. Our task, it strikes me, is to try and make it accessible, and for parents to understand the value.
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[28] Very quickly on the instruments, when we got the £300 million, if we were going to get lots more children starting, clearly, there’s a shortage of instruments, so the Government made £10 million available each year for four years. We had £40 million to be able to up that. That was necessary, simply because the retail had to gear up, and we had shiploads of violins coming from China and all sorts of things. What we didn’t do, and what I thought colleagues would do, was therefore make maintenance programmes and replacement programmes. So, some of those instruments are already going into disuse because we didn’t join up the dots. So, whatever solutions you come to, further down the road, I’m very happy to help, from some of those very practical experiences. We looked at procurement. It’s quite difficult, because a beginner trumpet would be different from an intermediate trumpet and the violin—as you say, there are some procurement issues, especially with clarinets and a whole host of things like that. So, it was quite tricky to look at procurement and get better deals. We’ve had three goes talking with the music industry in England about trying to work out a sensible procurement, and failed each time.
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[29] What one group of colleagues in the south-east of England are doing at the moment—and it’s the only place it’s happening, and we’re watching it—is they are interloaning. So, having bought some instruments that are, in some cases, no longer being used, the neighbouring authority might well want to use those for some other children. So, we’re trying to find almost a swap scheme, a way of sharing, because it was public funds that bought them in the first place and we want children to be playing them—we don’t want them to be sat in cupboards. Is that okay?
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[30] Dai Lloyd: Absolutely; that’s very good.
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[31] Bethan Jenkins: Lee Waters.
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[32] Lee Waters: I’d like to pick up on a comment about your own experience and your empathy with trying to find a model that serves children from backgrounds where their parents might not be able to fund private tuition and whether or not the hub model can help in that regard. I note that the Ofsted report, a few years ago, showed that the new model was showing no sign of improving the quality of music education in all state-funded schools, and that there were still reports that some schools were harder to reach, citing challenges around capacity and resource and communication with schools. So, clearly there’s no magic bullet in this regard. I’m just wondering if you can give us some of the experiences of the shortcomings of this model in achieving what you’ve set out to do.
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[33] Mr Hallam: As I said, I think, at the beginning, the model works fine in principle; the implementation of it, for all sorts of reasons, is much more tricky and it’s long term. The hub model itself has—. Some music services are already working in partnerships and the concept of the hub was more about saying that there are a range of public funds that go to different sources and through different routes, like local public funding through local authorities or Government. So, you had money going directly to schools for music education, you had local authority money, or money sometimes sent down, from 1999 onwards—central Government money going into music services—and then you have money through the lottery and the arts council and other funds, all of which are trying to improve the quality of education for young people.
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[34] What we saw as the problem—. As ever, policies and things are trying to solve problems. So, something’s happening, something’s not working, and now we have a policy that addresses that. But, of course, then suddenly it has other unintended consequences. So, the problem that the hub was trying to solve structurally was that we’d had a period of encouraging colleagues to work in greater partnership for the benefit of the child so that the child’s music education made sense. So, if you had an orchestra or an opera company coming in to do a project in a school, it would take account of where the children were in their musical learning. If one of those children was singing in a music theatre group through their local authority, that information would be known and they would be able to include that, as opposed to the most silly example of, say, an orchestra coming in and saying, ‘This is a violin; it has four strings’ or ‘You blow down a tube’—it’s all very entertaining—and ‘A trumpet works like this’, when, actually, you’ve got a grade 5 trumpet player sitting in the classroom.
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[35] It’s about trying to improve the quality, because, either through public funding or through charities, meaning really well, people were giving grants to make this happen. So, it was about, ‘Can we join this up better for the child?’ You would, again, sometimes find that the projects were all coming into the same school because they had a music teacher who was really good at writing reports and had contacts and knew who to ring. That’s great for those kids, but actually that project, slightly tweaked, would be even better for this school down the road, where there were some deprived children. So, could we have a dialogue that helped to see where a particular offering would be a good fit to enhance and build on it so that you got the basic curriculum for every child in the school with some children going on through music service provisions and then that is enhanced? So, all of that was the concept about joining together. If you had a lead organisation that would try to network it, then that was it. So, part of it was about trying to manage the provision better.
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[36] On the Ofsted point, and the hubs, two things happened. There were a number of reasons, obviously, because there’s never just one reason. But, between 2010 and 2012, the Government was downsizing in terms of its hands-on work and wanted a way through. Because some of these changes were proving resistant—and again, I’m sure you’ve recognised some of that—one mechanism was that, if we made the lead organisation apply for a grant, and our mechanism was through Arts Council England, then you’ve got a grant-giving body that has systems and people in place who are ready to look at things, and you could actually start challenging and moving things forward a bit more. So, the concept coincided with trying to reduce the amount of civil servants and people at the centre but, actually, it was an opportunity for the Department for Education to give money to the arts council to manage the distribution, then managing the bidding process and then holding people to account. So, again, structurally, you’ve got something trying to make that work.
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[37] In terms of reach, we’re in about 86 per cent of—
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[38] Lee Waters: Can I just ask you about that process? Clearly, that’s not really going to address the issue of the schools that weren’t interested in taking part in the first place, because they’re simply not going to bid for the grants. So, how do you get to those hard-to-reach schools?
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[39] Mr Hallam: The grant was open to an organisation that would be able to look after the whole of a local authority area. So, an individual school could have bid—and, in fact, a couple of them did look at putting in bids—but it wasn’t a way in which they could get funds for themselves and then a little bit out of outreach to other schools. The point was you had to distribute and show, and have a—. First of all, you had to do a needs analysis. Then you had to come up with a business plan. Governance-wise, the ideal model, again, is where you’ve got headteachers sitting, you’ve got councillors, you’ve got parent representatives—so, again, rather like a school governing body; you’ve got a range of people feeding into the strategic decisions. So, you’ve got a strategic decision level and then you’ve got an operational and delivery level. The next time round, it might be different, because we could have some academy chains bidding; who knows? But the concept was that it was open for somebody to organise and bring those various contributors to music education together in one place.
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[40] Some schools don’t engage now, and the autonomy we give to our schools, which has increased, works against, to some extent, some of the other policies of the music service, because if a headteacher—. And you’ve got things like the English baccalaureate, we’ve got Ofsted and those other aspects of focus for a school—about what they report on, what they are examined on and what they are inspected on. That’s going to drive them. Although we’ve got a broad and balanced curriculum for academies and we’ve still got statutory music for others, those other things will trump what is happening in terms of music. Certainly, we’re seeing a reduction. So, the policies, again, are working—potentially not against each other, but not quite in sync.
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[41] The outcome of that is that we’re at about 86 per cent of primaries, we’re at about 82 per cent—these are national figures. In some places, it will be 100 per cent; in others, it’s lower. Eighty two per cent of secondaries; it’s only about 54 per cent of special educational needs. That information therefore tells us we’ve got to work harder at the special educational needs schools and for those children. But all of that takes time; you gather the evidence and you look at why it’s happening. If the head is saying, ‘I’m a school in special measures’, even though we can prove that music will help you get out of special measures, unless they want to take that leap of faith, if they don’t want to do it, then you’ve got to respect that. So, there will be some schools who are not there.
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[42] Finally, just linking in with the Ofsted point and what happens there, remember the Ofsted report was in 2013 and the hubs were only established in 2012, so I would have been very surprised—. Although the report was published in 2013, it was on the data from 2012. So, essentially, we encouraged that to happen because it was another way of trying to push the ones who were slightly resistant. The best are fabulous, as you have in Wales—some of the best ones are absolutely fabulous. You needed to create the opportunity where they could just simply carry on doing the excellent work they were doing. Where it’s through a different vision or a different local context, you need to tease into the detail, find out what the issues were and say, ‘How do you address this?’ on the basis of the concept that, ultimately, music is important, it makes a big difference to people’s lives and young people should have the opportunity to explore whether they want to engage.
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[43] The final point I’ll throw in here is that the problem we had, even though we’ve had a statutory national curriculum since 1988—it was England and Wales in those days—many primary schools, 30 years later, nearly, have still not been able to give their children a decent primary education. It goes back to my point about physics and everything else. If you’re appointing a primary school teacher in a small primary school, then other things are going to be more important than whether they’ve got music. You may or may not be able to go somewhere into the community to help, but even if it was statutory, no headteachers ever went to jail because they didn’t have a decent music education on their curriculum, and that’s the reality—nor would we expect that to happen. So, the issue, therefore, is: how do we support that, music services being on the ground, and—. And so what we did with the national plan in England was to say that the role of a music service is to support and augment the basic entitlement that a school does. And because schools will do it slightly differently, the music service should be flexible to help us support the role of the schools, but the schools get the funding for their own curriculum and their extracurricular activities, and they decide to do what they will with that. The central Government funding enabled us to have another layer that had an infrastructure but also had the roots, then, through to national ensembles and things like that.
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09:30
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[44] Bethan Jenkins: Did you have anything to come back on there?
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[45] Lee Waters: I just want to ask about that hub model more broadly. I’m not sure if anybody else—. Am I okay to go on to that? Unless somebody else wants to raise that—
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[46] Bethan Jenkins: I think Suzy did, so—
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[47] Suzy Davies: Yes, I have a couple of questions, but if I miss some, I’ll come back to you—no problem. You said a whole load of things there I want to ask you different questions on now. What I’d like to get to the heart of is the distinction between what’s provided in schools as a matter of course and what additional—what extra the hubs bring. I can see from evidence that the core purpose of the hub is to make sure that every child of statutory school age has the opportunity to learn a musical instrument through this whole-class ensemble teaching. Now, I appreciate that you’ve managed to hit well over 80 per cent of schools, but these hubs provide whole-class ensemble teaching, according to the latest report, for just under 10 per cent of the total number of pupils in both sets—primary and secondary schools. That’s quite a way off the actual core intention. I think it’s me misunderstanding figures; can you talk me through those?
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[48] Mr Hallam: Absolutely. As ever, it depends what you count and how you count it. And this is one of the challenges, just as a quick aside, that—. We have just got another organisation to look at the 2015-16 academic year figures. We’re not convinced we’re asking the right questions, or if we have been asking the right questions, we’ve still not been interpreting the answers properly. The first thing to say is that, effectively, the real figure one needs to look at is that that’s 10 per cent of the whole school population getting a First Access opportunity. A few years ago—. We moved to that for all very good reasons, but, a few years ago, actually most of the opportunities are in key stage 2. So, the seven to 11-year-olds. That makes logical sense: if you’re going to give a taster, that’s probably the most productive time to do it. In which case, you’ve already reduced five to 18 down to a four-year population figure, and actually if you’re giving it to one year, you need a quarter of that. So, 10 per cent is pretty close to 100 per cent of one year group. And so that’s where it’s coming in. So, really it’s trying to—. Every child should have—. When I was talking about family backgrounds and things, that’s why we went, ideally, for a year. With the economic downturn, we went from £100 million down to £75 million. We realised we’d seen some good shorter-term projects. We still felt ideally it should be a year, but we put in a minimum of a term, and that’s where it came to. Sorry, does that—?
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[49] Suzy Davies: Yes, yes; that explains that. And then what does whole-class ensemble teaching look like? Is it 40 recorders, or is it a complete mixture of instruments?
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[50] Mr Hallam: Again, there’s freedom of choice and local decisions, because it needed—. The concept was it would build upon the basic education from nursery, reception and years 1, 2 and 3 and so forth, or wherever you came in. We encourage schools, for instance, not to do it in year 6, because by the time the children were going on, you wouldn’t have the benefit. So, there are some practical things. And if you start too young, at the age of five, you’re going to get a different thing from the age of seven, but then with the violin, you want to start younger than perhaps for the trumpet, because of second teeth. So, there are a whole host of factors to take into account about at what age you start each instrument. Given that not every child, having had the experience, would want to continue with that, but statutorily they were entitled to a music education—in your case, as part of expressive arts, going on afterwards—you need to be able to come out, but also it needed to be a part of a seamless education that made sense as well. So, it’s this notion of augmenting and supporting. And what would be offered would be offered on top of something that had happened already, and it would lead on to something and, for some children, it would lead on to their basic entitlement in schools and others would go off into other areas. That then depended on things like—if there was a strong bass band tradition, the school might want to do brass band instruments; if there was a strong folk tradition, they might want to do something else. When it got implemented on the ground, we did have whole classes of recorders; that would be for a school to choose. The ukulele became very common and very popular. We even had whole classes of clarinets and my point to the teachers then was: that’s great. The reason we often had whole classes of clarinets was because the only person who felt competent to teach them was a clarinet teacher who was prepared to give it a go. It wasn’t on any musical or educational decision. The question was: what are these children going to do afterwards? Are we going to have a clarinet choir? And great, okay, fine: you want bass clarinets, little E flat clarinets—marvellous—but what do you want them to do? Again, that should be a local decision. And, ultimately, what do we want, nationally? Did we want a national youth orchestra, which was for children from across the piece? If you want access for everybody, then some children should, at least, have their choice of instrument.
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[51] Research into why various professional musicians started playing their instrument comes down to two things: occasionally they will have heard a cor anglais oboe in Swan Lake or something and just be—or they’ll see a harp and hear the sound: ‘I want to do that’. Brilliant. They should be given that chance if we can possibly make it possible. The other thing is, ‘The teacher said that we need a double bass player’, or ‘We’ve got a French horn in the cupboard—you seem to be able to do that’. And even though they were given an instrument, through that instrument, the key, really, is access to music through an instrument that you have some facility for, rather than saying, ‘You’ll play the bassoon even if you want to be a fiddle player’, or whatever. So, within the families and everything else, there’s a route through. So, the ideal was that that’s what you’d try and create. The opportunities—
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[52] Suzy Davies: Just on that, there’ll be a child who responds differently to the French horn out of the cupboard and thinks, ‘This is really too hard’, and is completely put off the whole idea.
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[53] Mr Hallam: Yes.
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[54] Suzy Davies: What evidence have you got to show that, maybe the numbers going on into ensembles later on is due to that approach, as opposed to that very positive way you expressed it earlier on?
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[55] Mr Hallam: I think the only way you can address that is try to empower the people on the ground to look at a child and ask two questions: is the child showing some musical potential and is the child showing a musical interest? Because sometimes the most able children might want to do something else and they just do it as a pastime, and that’s great. But sometimes somebody who really passionately wants to do something will put the extra effort in and they’ll make it. So, again, it’s not just about raw talent, if you like. You have to put the trust in the people on the ground; it might be a teacher at a school, a class teacher who knows a child and sees that child blossoming through music and they haven’t blossomed in other ways. In which case, that child needs and deserves to carry on, so the decision about whether they carry on and with which instrument should be made locally.
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[56] It’s governed by the fact that—. There’s a danger—and this is a very personal position—that sometimes we are so accommodating in terms of what people want to do, or their preferences in the short term, and everything these days is fashionable—. In a rugby team, we’re going to have one hooker, we’re going to have one back, and in a football team, we’re going to have one person in goal—if you want an organisational structure to work, then you do need more violinists than bassoonists and so forth and so on. So, there is an element where, as professionals and educators, we have to at least take some responsibility, not for forcing but perhaps guiding and encouraging. I had parents of children who played the flute—tremendously popular—who were auditioning against 27 others to get into an orchestra, and those parents would say to me, ‘If only I’d known it was going to be so tough—’. They were wondering which one to—. And, nobody had actually said, ‘Well, if you want to do that, that’s great. It’ll be tough going, but at least—’. You know, let them make informed choices. That’s the thing. Informed choices is key.
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[57] Suzy Davies: Okay. My last question on that and I think we can have a short-ish answer on it—
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[58] Mr Hallam: Sorry. [Laughter.]
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[59] Suzy Davies: At some point, as you say, we could have a country full of clarinettists. Who is responsible for taking the strategic decision for helping—and encouraging lower down the system—so that that doesn’t happen and that we will have enough different instrumentalists for our big orchestras and ensembles?
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[60] Mr Hallam: I’d say you are.
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[61] Suzy Davies: So, it’s a Government—a parliamentary decision, or a Government’s decision.
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[62] Mr Hallam: Well, I’ll expand on it slightly—. [Laughter.]
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[63] Suzy Davies: It’s not your hubs, basically, then.
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[64] Mr Hallam: No. The Government is responsible for the direction. So, access and progression routes—you need certain permission to do things but also empowering locally. Headteachers with their budgets will make their decisions—what they want to do and how they want to do music. So, the Government creates a situation that is one-size-fits-all, but says that if a head wants to do something in their schools, it can try and support that. But, if you want, nationally, orchestras, choirs, brass bands, wind orchestras—the things that you’ve got already—and you say, ‘Actually, we value them and we want to keep them going’, then when I say, ‘You do it’, you have the authority to say, ‘We want this to happen’. So, if the schools Minister, for instance, in the national plan, said that he would love every school to have a choir and an orchestra—. So, what you can do is put—. Now, that doesn’t happen, and some schools choose not to take any notice of that, but you have an awful lot of power in terms of suggesting and saying, ‘This is what we would value. This is what we’d like you to do’—an encouragement, even if you also want to finesse that with local decision making.
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[65] Suzy Davies: Okay. Lovely, thank you. Thank you, Chair.
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[66] Bethan Jenkins: I just had a question coming from that. We’ve heard—well, I’ve heard from some people that, locally, people are choosing, obviously, other providers to come in—private providers and such—and they might provide an excellent class on samba. I’ve spoken to peripatetic tutors who’ve said, ‘Well, actually, we’re not against that’. They’re not against it, because they know that there are still provisions for them to go in and tutor the more traditional musicians. Has it come to a point where there are schools in England that are looking at these more potential alternative ways of delivering music, and then that is leading to potentially a problem with finding people to go on to these ensembles or orchestras because they don’t have that individual instrument to progress through, or they’ve gone in a sort of more organic group setting, which may aid them, to an extent, in terms of their personal progression, but won’t aid them if they’re looking for instrumental or career progression with an instrument?
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[67] Mr Hallam: Yes, and certainly there’s a lot of work out there for freelance samba and percussion instrumentalists, whether it’s samba, djembe drumming or a whole range of things. Absolutely, and that’s great—it’s wonderful experience. Rhythm is there, and a whole set of other things, if you wanted to touch on them in terms of the importance of music beyond music in terms of its impact on language and on reading—rhythm, we know, is massively important to helping children to read. So, there is a whole host of things there, but it goes back to the same thing. The reality is that we have to respect the autonomy and the authority of headteachers to do what’s right for their school in their patch.
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[68] Bethan Jenkins: But that conflicts with the national—
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[69] Mr Hallam: Yes, absolutely.
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[70] Bethan Jenkins: You say that the direction needs to come from the Government, and that they want to see orchestras and choirs in every school, but then that might conflict fundamentally with what the school wants to do. You can’t tell the school, so how do you then solve that problem?
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[71] Mr Hallam: That’s why you have music services, which can offer alternative provision, either after school, in a locality, and the school—
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[72] Bethan Jenkins: So, that’s on top of what the school—. Okay.
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[73] Mr Hallam: So, as long as the concept of what the music service is doing is enhancing and augmenting the school’s offer, if a school wanted to do a certain thing, that means that they might want to be—. Actually, the headteacher may see a role where they want to host the area ensemble. They want the primary schools to come and sing in their choir and play in their orchestra and be the centre, the base, for the music service in that area, because music services have to parachute in and use some premises somewhere. So, some schools will be more approachable to that. Some will say, ‘Actually, no—this is what we want to do, but if you want to learn the violin, then you can do that.’ The world can’t be perfect. When I was head of a service in Oxfordshire, we only had one harp teacher. It’s not quite so popular in the UK, is it?
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[74] Bethan Jenkins: It’s quite popular here, though. [Laughter.]
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[75] Mr Hallam: I used the analogy of an ice rink. There was an ice rink in Oxford, but if you lived in Banbury, which was 20 miles away, and you wanted to go ice skating, then it wasn’t the responsibility of the Government or the local council to build an ice rink. You could only go so far down this individual choice route, which is part of the—. Our job, I think, is to try and balance what is reasonable for individual choice and the greater good. And somewhere between those two—. So, you know, if one doesn’t work, you have to have an alternative situation. That alternative might not be perfect for everybody, but it’s better than not trying to do anything at all.
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[76] Bethan Jenkins: Lee, did you have more questions on the hub model or—?
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[77] Lee Waters: My only question was that Welsh Ministers have looked at that model and decided that it’s too inflexible, and that they preferred the more flexible alternative. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on the flexibility of the hub model, and whether other models would be better.
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[78] Mr Hallam: As I said, we’ll go back to the reason—I won’t repeat it, but thinking about the concept of the hub, which is about trying to support better partnership working—. As far as I’m aware—for anybody who reads the national plan, it is an enabling plan and it is flexible—I would totally agree that, in some places, it is being interpreted differently and perhaps less flexibly, and people are using bits, but that, again, comes down to the difference between policy and implementation that we all recognise. So, I’m not quite sure that the evidence of why—. I would never have thought—. A bit like the national curriculum—somebody might say, ‘I’ve got to teach this’. No, you’ve got to teach music. The content and the ways in which you teach are left to the professionals, but some people say, ‘I have to do this, and I have to do this in this order’, but if you look at it, that’s not statutorily down there and it’s not part of the national plan either.
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09:45
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[79] Lee Waters: So, given that there have been problems in interpretation in some areas, would you design it differently if you were starting again?
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[80] Mr Hallam: I think it’s the monitoring and how you challenge and support change and how you manage change. I’m just thinking—
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[81] Bethan Jenkins: It’s fine.
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[82] Mr Hallam: Are you sure? Because there are two quick things. One is what I didn’t fully answer in your question—I made a quick note—that the First Access was a bit like a Trojan horse, if I’m honest, certainly from my point of view as a musician and educator; I don’t know what other people thought. The problem of not having good music education in schools, with often nothing to build on—but by getting musicians who were also teachers and felt confident in music—. The biggest problem in primary schools is the lack of confidence and sometimes lack of knowledge, and you can’t get it from a book. You can’t just read about it. So, the issue there is, if you can get somebody who’s going in week-by-week for a year, working alongside the class teacher—and there are all sorts of potential implications for planning, preparation and assessment and other stuff here as well—but if they’re working alongside the class teacher, then that teacher says, ‘Oh, now I understand. That’s not so difficult.’ The teacher helps the kids in the week, they can ask an expert on tap—somebody who’s popping in, friendly—you start to address that problem of lack of confidence in the early years that you can then build on.
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[83] So, as far as the planning was concerned, yes it was to try and give greater access to everybody, and, going back to your question, sir, one of the issues was that when we monitored it, and started monitoring, the problem was we simply counted numbers. And this is about quality music education not about numbers. So, the challenge was how many schools are you getting into and how many children are you seeing? Of course we cared about the quality, but the mistake I think we made in terms of the monitoring was that we were looking at pure numbers, so we could come back and say, ‘Your money’s working, Ministers, look at how many more children we’re getting to.’ We weren’t paying sufficient attention to the quality and the nature of that experience.
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[84] Again, the research shows us that, for all of the impact on music across all the personal, social as well as musical skills, and everything else, it has to be a quality experience. Now, I’m sure you have to go to a range of musical experiences in your roles and you’ll see that some of them are inspiring, and with some of them it’s just wonderful to see so many children taking part and enjoying themselves, but musically some of them perhaps aren’t what you might hope for. If that’s the case, then how do we help those people and those children to have a better musical experience alongside everything else? The danger is that if it’s not a good musical experience, it will have a negative impact not a positive one. So, music on its own doesn’t have all these wonderful things—good quality music education has these things. Poor quality music doesn’t, and worse than not having benefits, it actually can put people off and have a really negative impression. So, we hold that that quality is massively important—.
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[85] Bethan Jenkins: But arguably that could be because, in Wales, there are cutbacks in music in education and therefore they are on a shoestring in some areas and they can’t actually deliver the quality when they only have minimal staff able to go and take part in the ensembles or the orchestras after work—many of the tutors who were there before are deciding not to take part in those processes now. So, I wonder if you could comment on if you’ve looked at other countries and whether you can see that there are other ways of working, and if you have a view on what Wales can do now, because there’ve been many reports on this, and whether you can suggest what we could be doing better, given the fact that you’ve had those experiences in England.
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[86] Mr Hallam: Two quick ones. One, in the States they have much more of an instrumental bands programme going on, for example, but their teacher training—their music training experiences are much longer, and music teachers have to play several instruments. So, again, you’ve got a whole infrastructure about the training of teachers, competence and things like that, to have all the marching bands and all the other glorious stuff that goes on.
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[87] Look at places like Germany and Scandinavia, you have musikschule—a lot of the specialist music schools in Scandinavia and Europe—which is where parents will choose to go after school to take their children to an activity, which is great. But immediately you’re putting barriers of access and transport and valuing it in the first place in front of people, which is why I passionately believe our UK system—I express that because we do it differently in Scotland. Scotland has £10 million, which is probably even more than the £75 million we’ve got in England. Scotland have got music services and they’ve still cut theirs as instrumental teaching services, and there’s an argument for that as well. In England, we’ve gone down a road of broader, more joined-up, what we see as more collective, but that clearer focus on instrumental teaching ensembles. Again, they do it brilliantly in Scotland; it’s just a different choice. The choice of what you want to do in Wales is clearly how you want to do it for yourselves, but I would argue that the concept of music services going into the majority, if not quite all, schools, is a better model. Because other people across the world are—. Australia is closer to us. But people across the world generally are incredibly envious that we even have music in the curriculum—lots of places don’t—that we have a national plan, even if it’s not working as well. The fact that there is a statement of intent that we value this is massively important, even if it’s not working perfectly on the ground.
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[88] That comes back to this issue of it being a complex problem. You’ll always be able to find fault and problems with anything you cover. If you change some things, you’re going to solve some problems, but you’ll create others. So, the issue is: what are the key ones you want to solve? How do we solve little bits of the problem and move the whole thing forwards so, actually, in five years’ time, you look back and say, ‘Actually, this is better’? In the UK, that’s where I feel we are. There is some excellent practice and the best models—. What we’ve not been as good at, but we’re trying to do better now, is sharing and showcasing that best practice. The problem is that everybody’s so very, very busy that often they haven’t got time to lift their heads up and say, ‘Oh right—hey, that’s great, how did you do that?’, and you go back through the steps and say, ‘Okay, yes, you could do this’.
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[89] We’re building on that now, but, again, as your colleague was saying, it’s a very, very slow process. But the best practice happens—. The ideal practice is, if you’ve got good music education in a school already, you go in and enhance it, the class teacher is part of any programme usually and, better still, learning an instrument. There’s a whole set of stuff like Sistema England we could talk about. In Harmony Liverpool the headteacher plays double bass, the dinner ladies were all learning and they formed a staff orchestra. Her comment was that it turned the school into a learning community. The children, through music, had an improved relationship—. There’s all sorts—there’s so many things that can spin off if you get the things right.
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[90] Bethan Jenkins: Suzy wants to come in with another question.
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[91] Mr Hallam: Sorry, I—.
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[92] Suzy Davies: No, it’s okay; you may have been on your way to answering this question, anyway. One of the attractive features of the hubs for me is the fact that it potentially does involve so many groups and organisations; it isn’t just one particular music service from a particular local authority going in and doing what it does. But, in recent years, it has struck me that local authorities are becoming the lead organisations more frequently in these. Does that change the nature of what a hub looks like, because, obviously, local authorities have got loads of other things to do? Is that movement towards their dominating role as a lead organisation having a discernible effect, or does it not matter?
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[93] Mr Hallam: I think I’d state the obvious—that organisations are about people, and people in different positions. Depending on who’s in what position in which local authority and what their values are, then that will impact on where things are in the pecking order. So, it’s as pragmatic as that. Sorry, does that—
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[94] Suzy Davies: That probably does answer my question, actually. Thank you.
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[95] Mr Hallam: The other thing I wrote down, which I just jotted quickly, is that, as well as the structural side of things, there’s the employment situation. If quality matters so much, then the ability—. We’re having all sorts of problems as people have had to find cheaper ways of doing things, and, self-employed—if you’re self-employed, can you be self-employed if you’re required to go through some sort of professional development—and all those sort of complexities. So, the best way of ensuring quality, given that we want musical quality and educational knowledge and experience—. It’s not just—. I’m not just teaching an instrument; I’m teaching a child an instrument and music education—it’s part of the whole thing. Ideally, we want the teaching and the education as part of a package that they have knowledge about. So, the training and the continuing professional development is part of that.
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[96] There are massive differences these days—particularly thinking of the rural issue—with some of the opportunities through distance learning and backing tracks and things like that, which are available now. Technology, moving forward—. So, on the Music Mark website—and I can send the link through to Adam—they’ve done some research and they’ve got videos where headteachers are saying what matters and why music is important in their primary schools. There are examples of teachers talking about this whole class ensemble and the better practices. Because it comes down to expectations, again. One of the worst things we’ve seen, which then affects the continuation figures, is if you expect a child—whether it’s a French horn or anything else, but if you expect a child to play open strings on a violin after the end of a year, the odds are that they’re going to be pretty bored. If it’s open strings and first finger—pretty bored; three notes on a trumpet—pretty bored. And yet that’s what our colleagues in some places are doing. There are other places where you’re having everything in first position, whole scales and things, they’re playing tunes straight away, they’re doing it—Sistema, again, coming in as another approach about how you work using peer-to-peer learning, how you work in ensembles that can go on—. There’s a whole wealth of stuff out there. But, through necessity, we went from one-to-one to small group tuition, charging as well—. For small group tuition, we amended our charging in 2007 and our criteria became the length of lesson, which is equally critical. If you’re trying to make it more affordable and you drop to a 20-minute lesson, you’re going to start hitting the quality of what goes on and the ability to tune up and do everything else. So, there’s lots of minutiae—that’s all I’m saying—and this complexity, as I said at the beginning, you need to look at it.
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[97] What Government can do, and I think we did well in England, is to say that your decisions about the size of group and the decisions about length of lessons are for the professional to take and you need to be able to demonstrate and be held to account for taking those decisions on educational and musical grounds. So, I’m not saying how many or how long or anything else—we’re not even saying how much you charge—but what we are saying is, ‘Okay, you’ve taken that decision. How is that working? What is the progression?’ Non-musicians can ask those sorts of questions and be convinced. It’s not saying, ‘You must have a minimum of 20-minute lessons’, or ‘You must have a minimum of 30-minute lessons, if it’s a group of four; we can go to 20, if it’s a group of—’. You know, you can’t be doing with getting involved in that, I would suggest, humbly.
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[98] Bethan Jenkins: Well, I just know that I would be pulling my hair out if I was playing open strings for a year. When you said that, I was astounded.
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[99] Anyway, thank you very much for coming in. I’m sure that your evidence will be taken into account when we have—[Interruption.] Don’t worry; we’ll clear it up now—it’s good that it happened at the end. [Laughter.] Thank you for coming in. You can check the record and see what you’ve said. Obviously, you can’t change it, but thanks for coming in. Diolch yn fawr.
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Gohiriwyd y cyfarfod rhwng 09:57 a 10:16. The meeting was adjourned between 09:57 and 10:16.
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Cyllid ar gyfer Addysg Cerddoriaeth a Mynediad at yr
Addysg Honno: Sesiwn Dystiolaeth Ragarweiniol 5
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[100] Bethan Jenkins: Diolch. Rydym ni’n gyhoeddus nawr, ac rydym ni yn mynd i eitem 3 ar yr agenda, sef ariannu addysg cerddoriaeth a gwella mynediad ati. Diolch yn fawr i’r tystion sydd wedi dod ger ein bron heddiw, sef Elinor Bennett, is-gadeirydd bwrdd y cyfarwyddwyr Gwasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias, Ann Pritchard Jones, rheolwr Gwasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias, a Gareth Kirby, cyd-gysylltydd y gwasanaeth cerdd, Gwasanaeth Cerdd Sir Gaerfyrddin. Fel rydych chi wedi ei weld, mae’n siŵr, rydym ni’n cymryd tystiolaeth gan nifer o bobl yn y maes ac yn ceisio dod lan ag atebion er mwyn hwyluso datblygiad yn y maes a ffeindio ffordd o weithredu yng Nghymru sydd yn llwyddiannus. Hoffwn ofyn i chi’n i gychwyn beth sydd yn gwneud eich gwasanaeth chi yn wahanol i wasanaethau eraill. Sut ydych chi’n credu mae eich gwasanaeth chi’n gweithio, ac a oes gennych chi atebion ar sut y gallwn ni weithio’n fwy effeithiol yng Nghymru yng nghyd-destun y sefyllfa ariannol sydd ohoni? Felly, croeso a diolch.
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Bethan Jenkins: Thank you. We are now back in public session, and we’re moving to item 3, which is the funding for and access to music education. Thank you very much to the witnesses who are here today, Elinor Bennett, vice-chairperson of the board of directors, Gwasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias, Ann Pritchard Jones, manager of Gwasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias, and Gareth Kirby, music service co-ordinator, Carmarthenshire Music Service. As you have seen, I’m sure, we are taking evidence from many people in the area and are trying to find solutions to facilitate development in this field and find a way of operating in Wales that is successful. I’d like to ask you, to start, if I may: what makes your service different to other services? How do you think that your service works, and do you have any solutions as to how we can work more effectively in Wales in the context of the financial situation we find ourselves in? Thank you. |
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[101] Ms Bennett: A gaf gychwyn ar hwn, efallai? Mewn ffordd, rwy’n credu ein bod ni o Wasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias yn cynnig syniad o lle gallwch chi ddatblygu i symud ymlaen. Ugain mlynedd yn ôl, cawsom ni’n ein rhoi mewn sefyllfa lle roedd yr holl wasanaeth yn dod i ben pan wnaed i ffwrdd â’r cynghorau mawr, ac nid oedd modd cadw’r gwasanaeth i fynd. Nid oedd digon o gyflogaeth o fewn yr ysgolion. Felly, fe sefydlwyd corff hyd braich i allu cael arian o’r ddau gyngor sir, sef Môn a Gwynedd, yn wreiddiol, i fynd ymlaen i ddarparu’r un gwasanaeth yn yr ysgolion. Ac mi oedd o’n dipyn o fenter ar y cychwyn, rhaid dweud. Roedd criw o bobl wedi dod at ei gilydd i ffurfio cwmni cyfyngedig drwy warant—efo nod hollol elusennol, ac fe’i sefydlwyd yn elusen wedyn—fel gwirfoddolwyr llwyr, heb fod â diddordeb uniongyrchol mewn unrhyw elw na dim byd arall, ond i symud cerddoriaeth yn ei flaen a sicrhau parhad i’r gwasanaeth.
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Ms Bennett: May I start on this, perhaps? In a way, I believe that Gwasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias does offer an idea of where you could develop to take things forward. Twenty years ago, we were put in a position where the whole service was coming to an end with the reorganisation of local authorities, and it was not possible to keep the service going. There was not enough employment within the schools. So, an arm’s-length body was established in order to get funding from the two county councils, namely Anglesey and Gwynedd, originally, in order to deliver the same service in the schools. And it was quite an enterprise, to be honest, at the very beginning. A group of people came together to form a company limited by guarantee—with a completely charitable purpose, and it was established as a charity subsequently—as complete volunteers, without any kind of interest in any profit or anything, but in order to move music forwards and secure a continuation of the service.
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[102] Felly, ar hyn o bryd, rwy’n credu y byddem ni’n hoffi meddwl bod beth rydym yn ei wneud yng Ngwynedd a Môn yn, a defnyddio’r gair Saesneg, blueprint i ardaloedd eraill trwy Gymru ystyried ei fabwysiadu, efallai yn eu ffyrdd eu hunain. Achos beth sydd wedi digwydd efo ni dros yr 20 mlynedd ydy tyfu gwasanaeth sydd yn tyfu o’r ddaear, mewn ffordd, ac yn ymateb i anghenion yr ysgolion, achos mae’n cael ei yrru, mewn ffordd, gan yr ysgolion, ac efallai, i ryw raddau, mae yna broblem o fewn hynny. Ond, hefyd, mae’r cynghorau sir yn rhoi arian craidd i ariannu’r staff gweinyddol, ac yn rhoi arian, wrth gwrs, i’r ysgolion eu hunain i allu prynu oriau. Ac rydym ni wedyn, fel cwmni, yn gallu creu system lle mae’r athrawon yn cael eu cyflogi gan y cwmni. Ac mae rhai ohonyn nhw’n gwneud hynny—ddim i gyd. Mae rhai fel petasen nhw’n cael e llawn amser—mae Ann yn gallu rhoi y manylion yn well na fi ar hynny—ac mae rhai sydd yn gwneud oriau. Ond maen nhw i gyd yn mynd i fewn i’r system, sydd hefyd yn gallu datblygu ensemblau, felly mae dwy ran i’r gwaith, sef y dysgu yn yr ysgolion a hefyd cynnal yr ensemblau, ac mae llawer iawn ohonyn nhw.
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So, at present, we would like to think that what we do in Gwynedd and Môn is a blueprint, perhaps, for other areas to consider adopting, perhaps in their own ways. Because what has happened with us over the past 20 years is that we’ve grown a service from the ground up as it were, in response to the needs of the schools, because it is driven, in a way, by the schools, and that in itself does present problems to an extent, perhaps. But, also, the county councils give core funding to fund the administrative staff, and, of course, to the schools so that they can purchase hours. And then we as a company can create a system where the teachers are employed by the company. And some do that, but not all. Some are practically full-time—Ann can give you the details better than I can on that—and others are employed on an hourly basis. But they all go into the system, which can also develop ensembles, so there are two parts to the work, namely the teaching in the schools and also maintaining the ensembles, and there are many of them.
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[103] Bethan Jenkins: Fe wnawn ni ddod at fwy o gwestiynau yn y man; jest cwestiwn cychwynnol oedd e. Jest yn glou gan Gareth, ac wedyn os oes rhywbeth ychwanegol rydych chi—.
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Bethan Jenkins: We will come to more questions; that was just an initial question for you. Maybe I can hear from Gareth quickly, and if you have anything additional to add—. |
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[104] Mr Kirby: Yes. I think, probably, from Carmarthenshire’s point of view, we are one of the most expensive services in Wales. We have an hourly rate of £57, so I think what sets us apart from a lot of other services is our cost, our expense. I think we’ve got an excellent team of peripatetic teachers that are supported well by our schools, but I think a lot of it does basically come down to cost. We’re quite a rural county, and therefore we rely on schools being able to afford to buy us in, and that’s quite a difficult challenge at the moment, obviously. We know what the situation is, but, over the last few years, we’re seeing between an 8 per cent to 10 per cent drop in buyback every year, not because schools don’t want to use the music service, but they literally can’t afford to do it. I think Karl Napieralla put it, in the last report that he did, that it is left to headteachers to decide on the importance that they place on music. So, you could have, for example, in our county, two schools of similar sizes where one headteacher places significance on music and has the peripatetic staffing, and another that prioritises other areas of the curriculum. I think, for us, that’s the main problem at the moment.
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[105] But, you know, I think it is positive, because there are a lot of good things that go on in Wales as far as the teaching is concerned; we just need to look at a way forward to try and make it right. I don’t know whether we look at a pupil entitlement—whether every child across Wales is entitled to access to instrumental and vocal tuition. I know we could say now that they should be having access to that, but, in reality, that’s not necessarily the way that it does happen. And it needs to be something that’s fair and equitable across all of Wales as well, I think. If you can have a harp lesson in our county, you should be able to have a harp lesson throughout all of Wales. I think that pupils should have that opportunity.
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[106] Bethan Jenkins: Ann, a oes rhywbeth gennych chi i’w ychwanegu?
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Bethan Jenkins: Ann, do you have anything to add? |
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[107] Ms Jones: Nac oes—dim i ymhelaethu i’r hyn mae Elinor wedi ei ddweud, diolch. |
Ms Jones: No. I don’t have anything to add. I think Elinor has said everything.
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[108] Bethan Jenkins: Suzy Davies.
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[109] Suzy Davies: Thank you. Just to help us understand the starting position on this, with primary schools I’m assuming that there are music services. There isn’t a music teacher as such, and so every county in Wales will have to buy in a service at primary school. At secondary level, where there’ll be music departments, is there a huge variety as to what they provide themselves in schools, and/or what has to be brought in? I’m just trying to get a sense of the picture—
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[110] Mr Kirby: For us, at primary school level, at key stage 2, we do go into primary schools and provide the statutory requirement at key stage 2, but some schools do have their own curriculum specialists that do feel that they can deliver what is required, but it does vary in secondary schools as well. Again, it depends on what they can afford as to whether they prioritise a choir, maybe, that, sometimes, heads of department will feel more than happy and are very, very well qualified to take on, or whether they feel that they do want to have a school orchestra. A lot of schools do have this drive with instrumental and vocal—both—so that we can support things like the Eisteddfod and things like that in Wales, and the music youth festivals as well.
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[111] Suzy Davies: Okay. So, both of you are facing a position where, when a school invites you in, it’s going to be different from the school next door. Their starting points are all different is what I mean. Because of that, do you find that your services are requested for particular year groups over other year groups? Where’s your main point of work? Or is it really across the board?
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[112] Ms Jones: Mae’r rhan fwyaf ohonyn nhw yn cychwyn o flwyddyn 3 mewn ysgolion cynradd. Nid oes llawer cyn hynny. Ond i ddod yn ôl at beth oeddech chi’n ei ddweud yn gynharach, mae lot o’r ysgolion yn defnyddio athrawon cerdd i wneud corau, ac yn y blaen, ond, os ydyn nhw eisiau arbenigedd gwahanol, maen nhw yn dod atom ni ac yn ei brynu fo i mewn, fel ar gyfer eisteddfodau, ac yn y blaen. Mae’n dibynnu ar beth ydy’r angen yn yr ysgolion, ac rydym ni yn ei ddarparu ar eu cyfer nhw, beth bynnag ydy’r angen ar y pryd.
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Ms Jones: Most of them do start from year 3 in primary schools. There isn’t a lot before that. But, coming back to what you said earlier, many of the schools do use music teachers to hold choirs, for example, but, if they want a different speciality, they do come to us and buy it in, for eisteddfods, for example. It depends on what the need is in the school, and we will provide it for them, whatever that need is at the time. |
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[113] Ms Bennett: Felly, mae o’n gallu bod yn ‘patchy’ ydy’r gair, rwy’n meddwl. Nid oes unrhyw fath o beth yn tynnu’r cyfan at ei gilydd. Mae dwy ysgol yn gallu bod yn wahanol; mae dau awdurdod yn gallu bod yn wahanol iawn. Rwy’n credu mai dyna ydy’r peth—. Mae gen i angerdd am hyn hefyd—bod angen edrych arno fo fel bod plentyn yng nghanol Cymru yn cael yr un fantais ag y maen nhw’n ei gael yng nghanol Caerdydd, lle mae yna ddigon o allu a digon o gyfle iddyn nhw ei wneud, ac sydd hefyd yn nghanol sir Fôn. Rwy’n meddwl ei bod yn bwysig ein bod ni’n edrych ar y cyfan o’r ddarpariaeth.
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Ms Bennett: So, it can be ‘patchy’, I think is the term I’d use, because there’s no kind of co-ordination. Two schools can be different; two authorities can be very different. I think that this is the thing—. I’m very passionate about this, that we need to look at this so that a child in mid Wales receives the same advantage as they would in central Cardiff, where there’s plenty of opportunity, and also somebody in the middle of Anglesey. I think it’s important that we look at the provision in its entirety. |
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[114] Suzy Davies: A ydych chi’n dod o hyd i angen am ryw fath o offeryn yn benodol? Rydym ni wedi bod yn sôn, gyda thyst yn gynharach—buom ni’n trafod y posibilrwydd o gael dosbarth llawn pobl sy’n canu’r clarinét, er enghraifft, yn lle cymysgedd o offerynnau. A oes gyda chi unrhyw ddylanwad dros hynny?
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Suzy Davies: Do you come across the need for some specific instruments? We were talking a little earlier about the possibility of having a class full of people who are playing clarinet, for example, rather than a mixture of instruments. Do you have any influence over that? |
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[115] Mr Kirby: Can I just jump in there on that point?
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[116] Suzy Davies: Yes.
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[117] Mr Kirby: I think, historically, we had the music development fund at the end of the 1990s, beginning of the 2000s, and I think that this development fund was excellent. Local authorities were given the funding to purchase instruments and to develop specific projects to go into schools, and I think an awful lot of that did happen at that time. I know we had a junior strings project that went into the infants sections in primary schools that was excellent. So, we were giving out violins and it was fantastic. But, whatever we do decide to go for in the future, we need to look at legacy, because, at that time, all authorities across Wales bought lots of instruments, and it was fantastic—brilliant. Eighteen years on, now, the cost for me to repair those instruments and maintain those instruments is cost-prohibitive. I’ve got a lot of instruments that are sitting in our storerooms that we can’t afford to repair, because we’re channelling all the funds that we have to actually get staff out into schools.
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[118] So, I think those projects are excellent, and I think they can work hand in hand, because I think schools like to have a menu of options—that they can have whole-class or whole-phase tuition, or that they can have more instrumental lessons in the traditional sense of flute, clarinet, trumpet, et cetera. I think schools like to have that menu and those choices, but I think, at the moment, it’s actually having the resources that are acceptable, therefore, for children to be able to play. There’s nothing worse than giving an instrument and the finger board comes apart within a week and we’ve got to try to find an instrument. So, the desire is there, but I think an awful lot of the time, the resources are—
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[119] Suzy Davies: My question—.
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[120] Mae’n ddrwg gen i.
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I’m sorry. |
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[121] Ms Bennett: Roeddwn i’n mynd i ddweud bod dewis offeryn yn rhywbeth mor bersonol, onid ydy? Mae plentyn yn tynnu at offeryn, ac mae hynny’n beth naturiol, ond rwy’n meddwl, hefyd, bod eisiau—efallai yn yr ysgolion, ac mae gennym ni, yn sicr, o fewn y gwasanaeth ysgolion—yr awydd i gael grwpiau, i gael cerddorfeydd. Felly, mae hynny’n golygu llawer iawn o bobl sy’n chwarae llinynnau, ac efallai fod y rhan fwyaf eisiau mynd at y gitâr, os maen nhw’n gallu—a diolch byth fod digon yn mynd am y delyn y dyddiau yma—ond hefyd rydym ni eisiau cael digon i wneud y bandiau chwyth ac yn y blaen. Ac mae’n dibynnu hefyd yn lleol, wrth gwrs—mae gennym ni lawer iawn, dros Gymru, wrth gwrs, o fandiau pres da iawn, iawn, ac mae cael gweithio efo’n gilydd ar rheini yn fantais fawr, ac rydym ni’n llwyddo i wneud hynny lawer, gan fod bandiau lleol fel Biwmares a rheini hefyd yn gweithio o fewn y system.
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Ms Bennett: I was going to say that choosing an instrument is such a personal issue, really, isn’t it? A child is attracted to an instrument, and that is a natural thing, but I think what is needed—perhaps in the schools, and certainly we have it within the school service—is the desire to have groups and orchestras. So, that means having lots of people who can play string instruments, but perhaps the majority are drawn to the guitar—and thank goodness there are quite a few going for harps these days—but we also want enough to have the wind bands as well. And it also depends locally, of course—we’ve got very many good brass bands throughout Wales, and being able to work together on those is very advantageous, and we often succeed in doing that because we’ve got local bands like the Beaumaris band and so on also working within the system. |
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[122] Suzy Davies: Felly, os oes rhywun sydd eisiau chwarae’r ffliwt, ond mae llawer o bobl yn chwarae’r ffliwt yn yr ysgol, cawn ni ddweud, nid yw hi i lawr i chi, er enghraifft, i ddweud, ‘Wel, mae gennym ni ddigon o ffliwtwyr, beth am y baswn?’, er enghraifft.
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Suzy Davies: So, if someone wants to play the flute and you have a lot of people playing the flute in a school, it’s not up to you, then, to say, ‘Well, actually, we have enough flute players, what about the bassoon?’, for example. |
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[123] Ms Bennett: Mi fyddai’r athrawon yn dueddol o wneud hynny, rwy’n credu.
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Ms Bennett: The teachers would tend to do that, yes. |
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[124] Ms Jones: Maen nhw’n annog hynny, ydyn. Yn aml iawn, mae’r archeb gyda ni, neu’r cytundeb efo ysgolion, sy’n gallu bod yn hanesyddol, lle maen nhw’n tueddu i gadw at yr un un offeryn. Ond mi fyddwn ni’n mynd i mewn ac yn annog, oherwydd rydym ni eisiau’r busnes pyramid sydd gennym ni, lle maen nhw’n cychwyn yn yr ysgol, maen nhw wedyn, fel maen nhw’n dod i radd 2 a 3 yn mynd at ein grwpiau rhanbarthol ni, wedyn maen nhw’n dod i drio gradd 4 a 5 ac maen nhw’n dod i’n grwpiau sirol ni, ac wedyn maen nhw’n mynd i gerddorfa gogledd Cymru ac wedyn i’r genedlaethol. Felly, rydym ni’n annog y system pyramid yma sydd gennym ni acw, felly.
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Ms Jones: They would encourage that. Very often, we have an agreement with the schools, and it can be historic, where they tend to stick to the same instruments. But, we would go into the schools and encourage, because we want this pyramid business, where they begin in the school and then, as they come to grades 2 and 3, they go to our regional groups, and then, as they attain grades 4 and 5, they come to our county groups, and then they go to the north Wales orchestra and then to the national orchestra. And so, we also encourage this pyramid system. |
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[125] Mr Kirby: Sorry, one quick thing as well: I think this is another reason why we have the peripatetic services. I think the physiology of the children comes into play here, as well. You were saying about the bassoon and things like that. You might have a child who will say, ‘I want to play the bassoon’, but perhaps their reach isn’t quite right. And you can buy short-reach bassoons and other such instruments to be able to make the instrument accessible, but, again, that comes down to availability and whether we have that. If we were working more in partnership with neighbouring authorities, it might be the case that we would be able to say, ‘Well, actually, we could lend some instruments to Pembrokeshire, if they have a need for them, because we’ve got some of those instruments.’ You can get curved-head flutes, for example, so if for a primary school child it is too far away, a curved-head flute brings it a lot closer for them to play. So, this is why the specialism of having the peripatetic staff on the ground is needed.
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[126] Ms Bennett: Rwy’n meddwl bod hynny hefyd, os gaf i ddod i mewn eto, yn tanlinellu’r pwysigrwydd o gael systemau o fewn yr awdurdodau, fel bod yna gydweithio eang yn gallu digwydd ac nad ydy o’n dod, efallai, i rai ysgolion sydd yn ddigon hapus i gael rhyw gerddor sydd o dan ryw gwmni yn dod i mewn—cwmni masnachol, rwy’n ei feddwl—ond sydd heb y rhwydwaith o gefnogaeth yna a darpariaeth y pyramid, os liciwch chi—yr addysg barhaol—i allu creu system ac yn annog plant i fynd ymlaen ac i wella, nid yn unig fel cerddorion, ond fel pobl hefyd, rydw i’n meddwl.
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Ms Bennett: And if I could just come in again, I think it underscores the importance of having systems within the authorities, so that there is broad collaboration and that it doesn’t come down to some schools who might be just happy to have a musician under a commercial company coming in, but that doesn’t have that support network behind that person and the provision of the pyramid—the continuous education—to be able to ensure that there’s progression and encouragement for the child to improve, not just as musicians, but as people. |
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10:30
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[127] Bethan Jenkins: A ydy hynny’n digwydd yn aml gyda chi yn y ddwy ardal, bod cwmni masnachol yn dod yn eich lle chi, ac wedyn mae yna densiwn os mae plentyn eisiau mynd lan y pyramid?
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Bethan Jenkins: Does that happen a lot in the two areas, where a commercial company takes your place, and then there’s tension, perhaps, if a child wants to move up the pyramid? |
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[128] Ms Bennett: Nid yw e wedi digwydd, nac ydy?
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Ms Bennett: It hasn’t happened, no. |
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[129] Ms Jones: Na. Rydym ni’n ffodus iawn.
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Ms Jones: No. We’re very fortunate. |
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[130] Bethan Jenkins: Na?
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Bethan Jenkins: No? |
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[131] Ms Jones: Na. Nid yw wedi digwydd—
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Ms Jones: No. We haven’t had experience of that.
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[132] Ms Bennett: Wel, rydym ni’n ffodus, efallai, ein bod ni’n byw mewn lle nad oes yna lawer o gwmnïau masnachol. [Chwerthin.]
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Ms Bennett: We’re perhaps fortunate in that we live in an area where there aren’t many commercial companies. [Laughter.] |
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[133] Bethan Jenkins: Gareth.
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[134] Mr Kirby: We have had—not a commercial enterprise, but there are private individuals that do go into schools. But there have been issues then regarding schemes of work, the disclosure barring service, and other such issues that have come into play. Where it’s structured with the authority, there are routes and progressions through the pyramid structures, and I think there’s reporting back to parents, et cetera. So, the structures that are in place—. Although some schools possibly have gone to private enterprises, they’ve tried to come back to the music service because of the structure that is in place, and the way that it currently sits within the structure in Wales.
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[135] Bethan Jenkins: Diolch. Suzy, a oes unrhyw beth arall gennych chi?
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Bethan Jenkins: Suzy, anything else? |
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[136] Suzy Davies: No, I’ll be all right for this, thank you.
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[137] Bethan Jenkins: Dai.
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[138] Dai Lloyd: Diolch am y dystiolaeth cyn belled. Wrth gwrs, cefndir yr arolwg yma o ochr y pwyllgor ydy bod yna bleidlais gyhoeddus wedi bod i bennu’r pwnc yma, a hwn oedd y pwnc a enillodd mas fanna. Felly, mae hynny’n adlewyrchu bod yna bryder mawr allan fanna ynglŷn â’r holl fusnes yma o addysg gerddoriaeth yn ein hysgolion. Felly, dyna ydy cefndir hyn, ac, yn y bôn, yn ogystal â disgrifiad o beth sy’n digwydd ar hyn o bryd—ac rydym ni wedi cael tystiolaeth ar beth sy’n digwydd yn Lloegr, ac ati, ac mae rhai pobl yn dweud bod canolfannau rhanbarthol yn gweithio’n well, neu nad ydyn nhw—rydym ni eisiau hefyd cynnig atebion. Felly, yn nhermau beth sy’n digwydd yng Ngwynedd a Môn, ac ati, yn enwedig efo chi, Elinor, sut mae’n gweithio efo’r ysgolion? Rydw i jest eisiau cael—. Hynny yw, mae yna wasanaeth ar lefel ysgol ac rŷch chi’n dod i mewn pan fyddai rhywun yn gofyn i chi, ac wedyn yn cynnig rhywbeth uwchben y gwasanaeth arferol, dyna beth sy’n—. A ydych chi’n gweld bod hynny’n llwyddiant? Rydym ni eisiau cael, fel rwyt ti’n ei ddweud, blueprint. Rydym ni eisiau rhyw ffordd ymlaen o hyn i gyd, gydag atebion, a chynnig i Weinidogion beth ydy’r ffordd ymlaen er mwyn gwella’r ddarpariaeth gerddorol yma.
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Dai Lloyd: Thank you for the evidence you’ve already given. Of course, the background of this inquiry, regarding the committee anyway, is that there has been a public vote to decide on this topic, and this was the successful topic. So, it shows there is great concern out there in relation to music education in our schools. So, that’s the background of this, and, of course, as well as describing what’s happening at the moment—and we have had evidence of what’s happening in England, for example, and some people say that the regional centres work better, or maybe they don’t—we also want to be able to offer solutions. So, in terms of what’s happening in Gwynedd and Môn, especially with you, Elinor, how does it work with schools? I just want to get—. That is, you have a school-level service and you come in when someone asks you to, and offer something in addition to the regular service, is that it? Does that work? We want, as you said, a blueprint. We want to see what the way forward might be in this, and to be able to offer solutions to Ministers regarding the way forward in relation to improving this music provision. |
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[139] Ms Bennett: Reit. Wel, y strwythur ydy bod y gwasanaeth, fel cwmni, yn gallu derbyn nawr y grantiau o’r siroedd. Felly, yna, rydym ni hefyd yn cyflogi Ann a Gwenda—dim ond dwy yn y swyddfa, un llawn amser ac un 20 o oriau—allan o’r arian craidd yna rydym ni’n ei gael o’r ddwy sir. Wedyn, mae yna arian ychwanegol yn dod i’r siroedd, ac rydw i’n meddwl bod Ann efo gwell cymwysterau i ateb hynny, ac i roi’r patrwm yn iawn, achos mai hi sy’n rhedeg y gwasanaeth.
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Ms Bennett: Right. Well, the structure is that the service, as a company, can receive grants from the county authorities. Then, we also employ Ann and Gwenda—just two in the office, one full time and one for 20 hours a week—out of the core funding we receive from the two counties. Then there’s additional funding that comes from the counties, and I think Ann is better qualified to answer that and tell you about the pattern, because she runs the service.
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[140] Ms Jones: Fel roeddwn i’n ei ddweud yn gynharach, mae gennym ni gytundeb efo’r ysgolion yma, ac mae’r rheini’n mynd allan tua’r haf, yng nghanol yr haf, felly—wel, na, tua’r gwanwyn, mae’n ddrwg gennyf. Wedyn, mae’r archeb yn dod i mewn erbyn mis Medi fel ein bod ni’n gallu dweud wrth y tiwtoriaid faint yw eu horiau nhw ar gyfer y flwyddyn.
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Ms Jones: As I said earlier, we do have an agreement with the schools, and they go out in the middle of the summer—or in the spring, I should say, sorry. The order will come in then by September so that we can tell the tutors how many hours they will have for the year to come. |
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[141] Ms Bennett: A gaf i dorri ar draws? Rwy’n meddwl ei fod yn mynd i’r ysgolion i gyd—yr ysgolion uwchradd i gyd, trwy Wynedd a Môn, ac i tua 90 y cant o’r ysgolion cynradd. Maen nhw i gyd yn cael y cynnig, ond dyna sy’n dod yn ôl.
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Ms Bennett: Sorry, can I interrupt there? It goes to all schools—all the secondary schools through Gwynedd and Môn, and I think to some 90 per cent of the primary schools. They all have the offer, but that’s what comes back.
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[142] Ms Jones: Ond beth rydym ni’n ffeindio sy’n digwydd rŵan ydy, oherwydd toriadau’r ysgolion, mae yna rai ysgolion yn methu—maen nhw’n defnyddio eu dyraniad cerdd yn eu cyllidebau efallai i dalu cymhorthyn neu rywbeth yn yr ysgolion, ac mae hyn yn effeithio ar ein gwasanaeth ni. Mae hynny wedi digwydd yn ddiweddar, yn anffodus. Ond mae’r mwyafrif wedi aros efo ni.
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Ms Jones: What we do find happens is that, because of the cuts within the schools, some schools aren’t able—they use their music provision in the budget to maybe pay an assistant in the school, and that does affect, of course, our service. That has happened quite recently, unfortunately. But the majority have stayed with us.
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[143] Y peth arall sy’n digwydd ydy, lle fyddan nhw’n wedi cael chwarter awr, maen nhw’n torri amser y wers i lawr i 10 munud oherwydd bod nhw’n methu ei fforddio fo, ac er bod y rhieni—. Mae’r ysgolion yn codi ffi; mae’r llywodraethwyr a’r pennaeth yn penodi ffi, ac mae hwn yn amrywio o ysgol i ysgol. Wedyn, mae’r rhieni yn cyfrannu at y ffi, ac mae yna subsidy yn dod o’r ysgol hefyd, a hwnnw sy’n talu am ffi’r awr ni o £38.04. Wedyn—rydw i wedi colli fy mheth, nawr, rŵan. O hynny wedyn, yn aml iawn, mae’n dod lawr i dorri’r gwersi o chwarter awr i 10 munud oherwydd eu bod nhw’n methu fforddio ffi’r awr, felly. Mae hynny’n bechod, achos nid yw 10 munud yn fawr o amser i wers. Weithiau, mae yna rai tiwtoriaid yn eu cymryd nhw fesul grŵp, hefyd. Efallai eu bod nhw’n cael hanner awr, ond efallai bod yna bedwar neu bump yn cael gwers o fewn yr hanner awr yna.
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Another thing that happens of course is that, where they would have had 15 minutes, they’ve cut the time of the lesson down to 10 minutes, because they can’t afford it, and although parents—. The schools charge a fee; the headteacher and the governors decide upon a fee, which does vary from school to school. Then, the parents contribute to that fee, and there’s a subsidy also from the school, and that’s what pays our hourly fee of £38.04. Sorry, I’ve lost my thread, now. From that, then, very often it comes down to cutting the lessons down from 15 minutes to 10 minutes, because they can’t afford the hourly fee, and that’s a terrible shame, because 10 minutes isn’t much time for a lesson. But sometimes, some tutors will take groups, for example. So, maybe they have half an hour, but maybe four or five have a lesson within that half an hour. |
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[144] Bethan Jenkins: A ydy’r 10 munud yn cynnwys tiwnio’r offeryn hefyd?
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Bethan Jenkins: Does that 10 minutes include tuning the instrument? |
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[145] Ms Jones: Ydy, yn hollol.
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Ms Jones: Yes, it does. |
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[146] Ms Bennett: Mae wedi dirywio llawer iawn. Mae hynny’n un o’r gwendidau mawr a’r peryglon—risks—sydd yn y system.
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Ms Bennett: It has actually declined. It’s one of the great weaknesses and one of the risks in the system. |
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[147] Mr Kirby: I was telling the ladies before we came in, I was in a school yesterday, teaching 12 brass players in half an hour, and you might think, ‘Well, that’s not too bad’, but when you’ve got trombones in there and French horns in there, all in different keys and all at different levels and standards—. A parent from the school did speak to me last week and said, ‘So, how long do they actually have for tuition in the school?’ and he said, ‘Is it 10 minutes?’ I don’t know how you answer that question and quantify it. I wouldn’t actually be able to tell you. It’s getting very, very difficult and I think schools are having to make the decision as to, ‘Right, that’s the hourly rate, therefore, I can afford x amount of hours, therefore, I’m going to have to cut woodwind by half an hour, brass by half an hour, strings, classroom support.’ So, I think they’re having to make those decisions, not on what’s needed by the numbers that are necessarily in the schools or the instruments that they have, or the choices, but how much they can actually afford.
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[148] But again, as the ladies have alluded to, not only is it not the same across Wales, it’s probably not the same across counties. You could look at schools of similar sizes, as I said earlier, where a certain number of hours is bought in, but a school of a similar size, maybe, in a different town or area is half or less than that.
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[149] Dai Lloyd: Ar gefn hynny, beth rydym eisiau trio cael gafael arno fo ydy: beth sy’n mynd i ddatrys yr heriau yma? Ai ateb ariannol yw e? Ynteu, a oes eisiau ad-drefnu strwythurol, felly? I fod yn glir—a buaswn i’n licio bod yn glir fy hun—a ydym eisiau rhyw fath o ad-drefnu strwythurol, rhanbarthol, ynteu ai dim ond cwestiwn o ragor o arian yw e?
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Dai Lloyd: On the back of that, what we’re trying to get to grips with here is: what is going to solve these challenges? Is it a financial solution? Or, do we need reorganisation on a structural level? To be clear on this—and I’d like to be clear myself on it—do we want some sort of structural reorganisation on a regional level, or are looking at just more money?
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[150] Ms Bennett: Na. Rydw i’n meddwl ei fod yn sicr yn strwythurol. Mae’r ddau beth ynghlwm â’i gilydd. Rydw i’n credu bod angen—. Yn arbennig, mewn rhai llefydd, nid oes yna ddim darpariaeth beth bynnag; mae wedi edwino cymaint, ac wedi mynd. Felly, mae’r ochr strwythurol yn sicr yn rhywbeth sydd eisiau edrych arno fo, ac i wneud yn siŵr bod yna drefniadaeth o fewn pob clwstwr. Rydych chi, rŵan, yn y broses o orfod edrych ar lywodraeth leol, felly rydw i’n meddwl ei fod yn amser da iawn i fod yn ystyried sut mae’n effeithio ar hyn, a mynd yn ôl 20 mlynedd pan oedd y llywodraeth leol yn un mawr.
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Ms Bennett: No. I certainly believe that it’s structural. Both issues are intertwined. I think we need—. Particularly, in some places, there is no provision anyway; it’s declined so much, it’s actually disappeared. So, the structural side is certainly something that we need to look at and to ensure that there is an organisation within every cluster. You’re now in the process of having to look at local government, so I think it’s a very good time to be considering how that has an impact on this, and to look back to 20 years ago when local government was large.
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[151] Ond, wedyn, crunch yr holl beth ydy’r arian, wrth gwrs, ond bod hwnnw’n cael ei ddefnyddio yn y ffordd fwyaf cost-effeithiol posibl. Er enghraifft—ac nid wyf cweit wedi ateb y cwestiwn gwreiddiol—mae’r ysgolion i gyd o fewn ein system ni’n cael dyraniad cerdd, onid ydyn nhw? Ac rwy’n meddwl trwy Gymru, mwy na thebyg, eu bod nhw’n cael dyraniad cerdd. Felly, wrth gwrs, mae hwnnw yn eu cyllidebau nhw. Dyna yw’r un, rwy’n credu, sydd angen ei ‘ring-fence-io’, a bod yn onest, fel nad yw’n bosibl i hwnnw fynd i ryw achos arall, os liciwch chi, sydd efallai yr un mor haeddiannol, ond nid yw’n mynd i le mae o i fod i fynd. Nid yw’n cyrraedd y nod.
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But the whole crux of the matter is funding, of course, and that that is used as cost effectively as possible. For example—and I haven’t quite answered your original question—all the schools within our system are given a music allocation, aren’t they? And I think that all schools throughout Wales probably receive a financial allocation for music. So, of course, that’s in their budgets. That’s the one we need to ring-fence, to be honest, so that it’s not possible for them to divert that funding to some other cause, if you like, which might be just as deserving, but it wouldn’t be being used as it should be. It wouldn’t be reaching its intended target.
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[152] Yng Ngwynedd a Môn yn 2016, cawsom 21,433 awr y flwyddyn. Wedyn, roedd i fyny i ni yn y cwmni i drefnu’r athrawon i fynd i’r ysgolion yn ôl yr hyn yr oedd y prifathro, fel yr oedd Gareth yn ei ddweud, yn gofyn. Mae hynny’n wendid ac yn risk factor mawr.
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In Gwynedd and Môn in 2016, we had 21,433 hours per annum. Then, it was up to us, as a company, to organise the teachers to go to the schools according to the requests of the headteachers, as Gareth was saying, but that is a great weakness and a great risk factor.
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[153] Mr Kirby: I think we should set up a pupil entitlement in Wales, because I think it is partly structural, but I think we should go beyond what England and Scotland are doing and say that every child in Wales is entitled to access instrumental and vocal tuition. I think it is partly due to structure, because there some authorities that don’t have music services at all, or any provision, so it is entirely left up to—. There’s no LA provision. But I think we also need to be clear as well, with the advent of local management of schools, it is unhypothecated funding. So, particularly for our budgets, there is no line of funding that says, ‘Your music allocation is this’, so I think, going back to do hypothecated funding and saying, ‘Yes, we will ring-fence a certain amount’, that’s going to unravel LMS, I think, to a certain extent, and I think we’ve got to be careful of certain structures that are in place. I haven’t been told to say that by my county finance officers either, right, but I’m just putting it out there. I hope they’re watching. [Laughter.]
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[154] But the point is it is partly structural, because there should be an entitlement. If there isn’t a music service in Powys, but there is in other authorities in Wales, we should be asking the question in Wales: why? I’ve been in post now for nearly nine years, and we’ve done a lot of research and there have been inquiries, but we’ve never actually gone further forward than, I think eight years ago, when we said, ‘Let’s get a national framework in Wales; let’s say that every child should have access to this.’ How? Give guidance to headteachers in schools and say, ‘Right.’ Base it on pupil number; I’m not saying that should be the way to do it, but that would seem to me to be a fair and equitable way to do it, whether you categorise the schools or just base it solely on the pupil numbers that are there. But there needs to be a system that is fair.
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[155] Therefore, I think once you see that system being fair, the options will present themselves within music services because the schools will say, ‘Well, we have this allocation.’ Nobody’s going to deny funding. And I would say the resources that we do have will not stand up to any big drive in further development. We need to look at that very, very carefully going forward. Because what we wouldn’t want to do in Wales is say, ‘Right, every child has an entitlement to a music lesson in Wales, great’, and go back to the local authorities or to the trusts and say, ‘Off you go’, and then there’s no funding or there are no resources there for it. It’s very easy, I think—. You know, you go to these sessions and when we talk about the arts, people will say, ‘Give us money’, but it needs to be invested wisely to ensure that there is a legacy and a long-term strategy for it.
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[156] Bethan Jenkins: Diolch. Lee.
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[157] Lee Waters: Can I just follow up on that point, and referring back to what you said earlier about the need for consistency? The work Dai Smith did to inform his report on arts in education included a focus group that supported the idea of a national music strategy, which wasn’t in his final report. Is that something you think would help?
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[158] Mr Kirby: I think it’s got to help. Because, otherwise, individual authorities have the autonomy to decide what they want to do, and I think everybody should be given a clear steer of what we should be doing here in Wales. I think that’s what they’ve done well in England, and I think that’s what they’ve done in Scotland is not just to say, ‘There’s the money’; I think it has to be given in a clear direction. We won’t be able to call ourselves the land of song and talk about the Eisteddfod and things in years to come. I don’t want to throw words like ‘crisis’ and things like that about, but if we have a national structure and a strategy, they can build into all the cultural aspects like the Eisteddfod and things that we’ve got. I think it needs to have a national framework that comes as a steer, whether it’s done through consortia or whether it’s done through local authority music services or trusts—however it’s done. I think the consortia are probably a good idea at the moment—I think that’s the way that we’re structured at the moment. I think there needs to be a formalised strategy that we work to across all of Wales, otherwise we will still have this patchiness, where some authorities will say, ‘Okay, we’ll just do the bare minimum then.’ I think it needs that focus.
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[159] Lee Waters: But the tricky bit is the money, isn’t it? It’s easy for us all to say, ‘Let’s go and spend more on this,’ but we all know the realities that local and central government are facing. So, do you have any thoughts on where extra resources can be leveraged in from to help co-fund this?
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[160] Ms Bennett: We’re now going down the direction, as a trust, of applying—of course, like so many other arts bodies are doing—to trust funds and to other organisations, which we can do because of our status as a charity. I think that that must be a way forward. We’re employing a fundraiser, which is something we don’t want to do at all. Another thing we have to do on occasion—we haven’t talked about the ensembles yet, by the way, because that is an additional cost—is we’ve had to ask some of the parents who can, to contribute towards it on a yearly basis. I think we’re pressed, in order to continue with our work, to get these novel or innovative—they’re not very innovative in arts terms, really, because it’s been done for many years. But we, as an organisation, then can go and find these things. These days, as well, there are all the possibilities of going on and crowdfunding, and all those things as well, and applying using the internet.
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[161] Lee Waters: Have you had any success?
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[162] Ms Bennett: Well, we’re just starting the process, but Ann can come in on the parental thing. Well, for the first time last year—sorry, I’m just bringing this up because we had to, last year, get some funding for the instruments, and we got parents to contribute about £45 a year if they could.
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[163] Ms Jones: Towards the ensembles.
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[164] Ms Bennett: It’s not obligatory, but it is an extra, and we got £19,000 in, which really was a big asset to the company.
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[165] Mr Kirby: I think your point is a valid one, about how we’re going to fund it and where we’re going to go, but I think what we have to be mindful of is that we can’t keep asking parents to contribute any more. I think what’s tending to be the situation is that, certainly service level agreements go out to schools, and to be fair to headteachers, the only way they’ve got these days to try and plug that gap is to ask for a parental contribution. But we are massively disadvantaging children across Wales, therefore, by saying, ‘Well, if you can’t contribute—’. We have a free instrument loan scheme in Carmarthenshire, but if they can’t afford to pay for the lessons—it’s a subsidy, I know, it never covers the cost—.
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10:45
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[166] But then again, with ours—and I’m speaking for our own authority—we’re disadvantaging the children even further because we’re a rural county. The rurality of Wales needs to be taken into consideration here as well, because a child in Llandovery still has the right to have access to instrumental tuition. We shouldn’t be saying, ‘Well, because they’re further away and it costs more—’.
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[167] I don’t know how to answer your question. We’ve got a great friends organisation that is trying to raise funds. The children are great; they’re coming up with ideas of how to do it. I think every music service will go out busking at Christmas to try and raise funds, but it won’t even come close to actually denting what is required. I don’t have that answer, I’m afraid, and I don’t know how we do it. We had a fundraising group in our hometown that said, ‘We want to raise money for you.’ We said, ‘Great. How much money are you prepared to raise?’ They said, ‘Well, we can get about £15,000.’ That won’t cover an annual bill to repair and replace the instruments that we have. When we were explaining the situation to them, they were just saying, ‘How on earth are music services surviving in Wales when there isn’t this funding?’ But as I said, I think we blossomed and bloomed in the late 1990s and early noughties when the music development fund money was there. So, whatever we do put in place with this national strategy, if that’s the way we go, or a pupil entitlement, it must have legacy. We were talking earlier on: where are we going to be in 20 years’ time? I’ve got a 19-month-old son. What’s his access to music going to be? What are his pathways going to be? So, as a parent, as well as a teacher and educator, I’m thinking of that.
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[168] Ms Bennett: Also, I think, it’s a decision for you, as legislators. You have to decide whether you value this service as a public service, and that it needs to be supported on a statutory basis maybe. Because the problem is that, if it starts becoming a voluntary one, it will not be here in 20 years’ time—or the quality won’t be there.
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[169] Mr Kirby: It is difficult because the first thing that schools will do, as well—and there’s no disrespect to schools—is that, when Estyn appear in a school, it will be, ‘Put the orchestra in assembly’, and the pyrotechnics and the school staff will come out, and the orchestra will be there, and you will have a harp in reception, playing as they come in, and they think, ‘Oh, this is fantastic.’ In all reality, this has happened in a couple of schools recently with us, where the peripatetic staff have actually missed three other schools’ worth of delivery just to go into one school to put on a face, as if to say, ‘Well, this is fine because this is what’s going on’, when, behind the scenes—. I think one thing that we do have to be careful of here is that we could be at breaking point with peripatetic staff as well. I think they are absolutely working themselves ragged to try and—. I only have two schools of contact, with the role that I have, but certainly, for half an hour yesterday, to try and fit all of those children in for one half-an-hour slot was incredibly difficult. There are peripatetic staff—. There are good practitioners out there. What we don’t want to do as well is throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don’t want to start from scratch and say, ‘Right; let’s wipe the slate clean and start all over again’, because there are examples of excellent tuition, structures and strategies. So, maybe we just need to learn from the good examples that are out there. I think Karl Napieralla put that in his report as well: that there are some fantastic services that work really, really well. Maybe through Cymdeithas Addysg Gerdd Awdurdodau Cymru as well, the group may be able to do some work there maybe.
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[170] Bethan Jenkins: We are getting them in. Yes. Did you have any follow-up questions on that, Lee?
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[171] Lee Waters: No. Thank you.
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[172] Bethan Jenkins: Dawn.
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[173] Dawn Bowden: Thank you, Chair. I just want to follow on a little bit from that last point that we were talking about, particularly going back to the child entitlement, because the task and finish group report did identify that one of the challenges is around provision in areas of economic deprivation. I know that, in the areas that you cover, you’ve got significant areas of deprivation. You were talking about the fact that there is a difference in terms of the provision from school to school, which could be led by the policy of the particular headteacher. So, you’ve got that difference. You’ve got the geographic differences—the kinds of things you were talking about: the rurality—but you’ve also got the economic differences. What I want to know in particular on the economic side—those areas where we can identify significant deprivation—is whether you are seeing a disparity in the provision of music education amongst those particular children. If so, what do you think we need to do to rebalance that, and what kind of support might there be for children from less-economically prosperous areas? You were talking about relying more and more now on parents to fund it. For a lot of these kids, that just isn’t an option. So, where do we go with that?
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[174] Ms Bennett: I think there is a lot of evidence, isn’t there, that some schools are really having trouble getting enough students, pupils, coming forward for different reasons? I’d suggest that maybe the economic one is the big factor.
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[175] Mr Kirby: Schools will turn to their pupil deprivation grant for pupils who are on free school meals, but then you’ve got to ask yourselves the question: how far is that pupil deprivation grant going to go? Because it won’t just cover music, it won’t cover every single aspect of the curriculum, and although it’s easy for us to say, ‘Well, just tap into the pupil deprivation grant’, if that is already allocated for other areas that are given more priority—such as, you know, maths, English and the sciences—and to sustain and develop programmes within those areas of the curriculum, I’m afraid that music is, through no fault of its own, pushed further down the line. I think that’s something that we’ve got to be careful of as well, because otherwise, what enjoyment is there for children in the curriculum? We’re just, sort of, you know, saying, ‘I’m really sorry, you can’t access any of the creative arts and music because it’s just too costly and therefore we’ve cut it out of the curriculum.’ The children, therefore, that have that interest, they’re never going to get that opportunity. Sadly, again, it just comes down to funding, doesn’t it?
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[176] Ms Bennett: And I think it’s really very important that the children in all the schools have the opportunity to meet the musicians and to listen to performances. I think that that is lacking in many ways, you know, because there aren’t as many performances going into schools and inspiring them, if you like, because that is an important element of it. It’s all joined up, the whole thing—one thing follows from the other.
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[177] Dawn Bowden: Because we’ve heard from evidence previously that, you know, the provision of music education is not just about the ability for somebody to be able to play an instrument but the wider educational benefits of being part of an orchestra or an ensemble or whatever it might be—that you can’t really measure that, can you?
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[178] Mr Kirby: There’s a lot of research that’s been done on it. There was an education conference in England, I think, last week, where they looked at a school in America that had had problems with violence and security at the school, and they’d had a turnover of headteachers—I think it was five headteachers in five years. They just changed the ethos of the school and drove a curriculum through the arts. It changed the school completely. Discipline was better, the feel-good factor returned within the school, staff were happier as well as pupils being happier. I’m not saying that we change that within all schools—well, I’d like to say to change that—but, obviously, we have to take a measured response to it. But I think, you know, the benefits—there are masses of research that has been done by various organisations, and by national music forums as well, of the benefits, and I think schools do see this. It comes down to everything from a child, at 7 or 8, who participates firstly in the eisteddfod, gains the confidence from doing that one eisteddfod at the age of 7, and ends up possibly becoming an Assembly Member or something like that—because they’ve had that confidence. It could have happened. [Laughter.]
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[179] Bethan Jenkins: I’ve got the certificates at home. [Laughter.]
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[180] Mr Kirby: The proof is in the pudding. [Laughter.] I’m just saying, it’s not just for Assembly Members—[Interruption.] [Laughter.] I just thought I’d throw that out there—but it’s through all walks of life. The transferrable skillset, as I said—there’s a raft of research that’s been done on it. The thing is, I think, fundamentally, for us to keep saying, you know, we’re a land of song, and we keep pushing music as far as we did—. Every time we have an international game, we have the crowd singing and it’s fantastic—we used to have Wynne Evans coming across the field with a flag—it’s part of our culture and our heritage. But the thing is, if we’re not careful, we won’t be able to say these things in future years. I don’t mean to scaremonger to say that. To be totally honest with you, I am fearful of being a music co-ordinator as far as my job is concerned, because I do think, ‘Am I in the wrong job? Is there going to be a music service? Will we exist to be able to teach children?’ It might seem, ‘Oh, hang on, that could be, sort of, again scaremongering’—my wife’s a music teacher, and you think, we’ve had so much enjoyment out of it and travelled the world as a result of music, but not only that, the confidence and the other skills that we’ve had from music. We are fundamentally denying children across Wales, who could massively benefit from the transferable skillset of music, and that’s why I keep coming back to it—I’m not banging my drum about it, but a pupil entitlement here in Wales, to me, seems like one avenue we can explore.
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[181] Bethan Jenkins: I think you could always take a career change, you could try to be an Assembly Member. [Laughter.] Dawn, did you have—?
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[182] Dawn Bowden: No, that’s it. Thank you very much.
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[183] Bethan Jenkins: Suzy.
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[184] Suzy Davies: All of you’ve hinted there should be a top-down approach to this—you know, let’s have legislation, let’s have a national plan, and you may well be right here, but I just want to get on the record why you think local authorities in particular haven’t been able to build up a structure themselves. You started off earlier on by saying you can’t even get to share instruments properly with Pembrokeshire. Is it down to individuals? Obviously, I’m not expecting you to name anybody, but is it—
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[185] Mr Kirby: Sorry to cut across—we can. We do. My point, which I should have elaborated on, is we do work closely with Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion—as was the old Dyfed. We do share instruments. We have a great deal of collaborative working. We also work as a larger, six-county ensemble with ERW. But the point is, if it’s working well, and collaborative working does work well in some areas—maybe the authorities that I’m working with just have that agenda to drive through cross-border and collaborative working—maybe it’s something that’s got to be looked at elsewhere. I’ve got to be honest with you, I’ve had a tuba on loan from Ceredigion for a number of years. [Laughter.] They’re aware of it; they know.
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[186] Suzy Davies: Yes, but the point is, if you like, two or three Lego bricks go together, but you haven’t got 22 Lego bricks going together.
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[187] Mr Kirby: That’s the thing, and I think that’s where the system has fallen down.
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[188] Suzy Davies: Okay, thank you very much.
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[189] Dai Lloyd: On loan from Ceredigion? [Laughter.] [Inaudible.]
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[190] Bethan Jenkins: Elinor neu Ann, a oes gyda chi unrhyw ymateb i’r cwestiwn?
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Bethan Jenkins: Elinor or Ann, do you have an answer?
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[191] Ms Bennett: Ateb i’r cwestiwn yna’n benodol? Na, rwy’n meddwl bod yr ateb rydych wedi’i gael yn iawn. Ond rwy’n meddwl bod angen tynnu pethau at ei gilydd hefyd. Mae Gwynedd a Môn yn gweithio efo’i gilydd. Mae’r rheini’n ddau awdurdod ar wahân. Tan yn ddiweddar, roedd Dinbych hefyd, ond maen nhw wedi penderfynu mynd i lawr ffordd gydweithredol—mater i’r awdurdod yna oedd o. Rwy’n meddwl ei fod o’n gamgymeriad mawr ar eu rhan nhw—ac mae’n siŵr eu bod nhw’n clywed fi’n dweud hynny rŵan.
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Ms Bennett: An answer to that question specifically? No, I think that the answer you’ve received is fine. But I do think that we need more co-ordination, too. Gwynedd and Môn, as separate authorities, do collaborate. Until recently, Denbighshire was also involved. They’ve decided to go down the collaborative route—that was a matter for that authority. I think it’s a mistake on their part—and they’ll have heard me saying that now.
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[192] Ond rwy’n meddwl bod cadw—bod gyda chi cohesion, eich bod chi’n gallu cydweithio dros ffiniau sirol, os liciwch chi—. Mae gan y gogledd chwe awdurdod, ond ar wahân i ni yn gweithio efo’n gilydd, nid oes dim o gwbl—oni bai bod cerddorfa gogledd Cymru yn dod at ei gilydd. Mae hynny’n un pwysig sydd wedi cael ei roi yn ôl yn y system tua phum mlynedd yn ôl. Mae hynny’n gam pwysig iawn i’r plant.
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But I think that keeping—that you have cohesion, that you are able to collaborate across county barriers, if you like—. North Wales has six authorities, but apart from us working together, there’s nothing else—unless the north Wales orchestra gets together. That’s an important one that was put back in the system about five years ago. That’s a very important step for the children. |
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[193] I gael y mwyafrif o blant i gyd i mewn i’r system a rhoi’r dewis iddyn nhw, rwy’n meddwl bod rhaid i’r ysgolion—. Maen nhw, wrth gwrs, yn hollol hanfodol. Rhaid cael y rhieni mewn i fod â diddordeb reit ar y cychwyn. Rwy’n meddwl mai dyna lle mae’r busnes o gael accessibility yn dod i fewn—hygyrchedd—yn yr ysgolion reit ar y cychwyn.
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To get the majority of children into the system and to give them a choice, I think that schools must—. They are, of course, absolutely crucial. You have to get the parents interested right from the outset. I think that’s where the business of accessibility comes in—accessibility in schools right at the beginning. |
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[194] Bethan Jenkins: A allaf i jest ofyn cwestiwn ynglŷn â’r ensembles cenedlaethol—nid ydym ni wedi cyffwrdd cymaint ar hynny—a’r strwythur newydd sydd wedi cael ei ddatgan? Mae’r corff newydd wedi cael ei greu ac mae’r arian yn mynd i fynd draw o’r WJEC i gychwyn hynny. Mae consýrn bod llai o bobl yn mynd am y llefydd ar gyfer y cerddorfeydd cenedlaethol ac ar gyfer dawns cenedlaethol. A oes gyda chi gonsýrn am hynny o beth, gan fod dirywiad, efallai, yn yr hyn sy’n digwydd ar lawr gwlad?
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Bethan Jenkins: Can I just ask a question about the national ensembles—we haven’t touched as much on that—and the new structure that has been announced? The new body has been created and the funding will be going over from the WJEC to begin that. There is concern that fewer people are going for the places in the national orchestras and for national dance. Are you concerned about that, because of the possible decline happening at a grass-roots level? |
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[195] Ms Bennett: Ar hyn o bryd, na. Nid oes llawer o gonsýrn. Mae gen i ffigurau fan hyn yn rhywle—maen nhw’n cadw i fyny’n dda iawn.
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Ms
Bennett: No, not at the moment. There isn’t much concern.
I’ve got some figures somewhere—the figures have been
maintained very well. |
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[196] Bethan Jenkins: Yn eich ardal chi?
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Bethan Jenkins: In your area, you mean?
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[197] Ms Bennett: Yn ei hardal ni, achos bod y strwythur yn dal i weithio. Rydym ni’n gweld y peryglon, ond rwy’n diolch yn fawr i’r staff ein bod ni wedi gallu cadw’r gwasanaeth i fynd. Rydym yn gweld y peryglon, ond rydym ni dal yn gweithredu. Mae’r plant a’r bobl ifanc yn cael y ddarpariaeth ar y lefelau gwahanol, ac mae’r rhai sydd yn gwella ac ishio mynd yn cael y cyfle i fynd i’r ensembles.
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Ms Bennett: In our area, because the structure still works. We can see the risks, but I’m most grateful to the staff who we’ve been able to keep the service going. We can see the risks, but we’re still operating. The children and young people do receive that provision on different levels, and those who are improving and want to carry on are given the opportunity to go to the ensembles. |
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[198] Bethan Jenkins: O bob sector o gymdeithas, neu dim ond y rhai sy’n gallu fforddio?
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Bethan Jenkins: From all sectors of society, or only those who can afford it?
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[199] Ms Bennett: Mae hwn yn gymhleth, onid ydy? Ydyn, maen nhw’n dod o bob sector, wrth gwrs, ac mae yna gefnogaeth. Ond mae’n dibynnu ar gefnogaeth y rhieni yn ymarferol, nid yn ariannol bob amser. Rhaid inni gofio hynny hefyd. Rwy’n meddwl bod—
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Ms Bennett: This is complex, isn’t it? Yes, they come from every sector, of course, and there is support. But it depends on support from the parents on a practical level, not always financial. We have to remember that as well. I do think that—
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[200] Ms Jones: Mae yna gyfraniad gan y ddau awdurdod hefyd i’r rhai sy’n mynd yn genedlaethol. Maen nhw’n cael rhoi cais i mewn am 70 y cant o’r ffi. Mae hynny’n hael iawn, chwarae teg, o Wynedd a Môn. Mae’n arbennig o dda, chwarae teg.
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Ms Jones: There is a contribution from both authorities for those who go on a national level. They can send in an application for 70 per cent of the fee. That is very generous, fair play, of Gwynedd and Môn. It’s particularly good, fair play.
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[201] Bethan Jenkins: Mae hynny am barhau, felly?
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Bethan Jenkins: That will continue, will it?
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[202] Ms Jones: Ydy.
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Ms Jones: Yes.
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[203] Bethan Jenkins: Ocê. Gareth.
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Bethan Jenkins: Okay. Gareth.
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[204] Mr Kirby: That’s not the same case, I think, for local authority services across Wales. I think the cost is borne by the families alone. As long as the system—where it has separated, now it’s coming together. I think we have an extra tier. We have six-county ERW set of ensembles. So, they have progression from the county—with Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire, Neath Port Talbot and Swansea—they progress to the six-county ensemble and then to the national. But the ERW ensembles are funded by the local authorities. So, the local authorities are also putting funding in to an additional tier to give those opportunities to children as well. But, again, for how long is that able to be afforded to be done? When we talk about grass roots, it’s the secondary-school aspect that needs close attention, as far as the national ensembles are concerned, I think, because if numbers at secondary schools start to dip because of the cost implication. You can’t have grade-8 pupils all thrown into one half-an-hour slot and then expect them to audition for the national ensemble and to be of that standard to be able to do it. So, there needs to be an approach there, where somebody—what we call an ‘advanced pupil’—who is maybe a grade 6, 7 or 8 or grade-8 pupil, who is eligible for the national ensemble, needs that quality tuition to be able to go on to the national ensemble. Otherwise, we’re saying that you’ve got to look at private tuition or other measures, but that defeats the whole purpose of having a structure in the first place.
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11:00
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[205] Bethan Jenkins: Do you know that in Carmarthenshire the numbers have gone down as compared to Ynys Môn and Gwynedd, where they haven’t?
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[206] Mr Kirby: I think they fluctuate year-on-year, and you alluded to it earlier on, depending on the numbers that we have for those instruments. Staff will encourage those with minority instruments to go and approach it, but I think, last year, for the first time, we had a number of pupils from our county—not that they didn’t audition—who when they found out how much the course was going to cost, parents said, ‘We can’t afford that.’ I know that for the orchestra last year, pupils were asked to raise an additional amount of funding and they were looking at other ways to raise money to allow pupils to go on and pupils just couldn’t afford it. So, whereas I would have had maybe my top four or five violin players, who could have gone, this year, I think there was a dip initially, and I know it did recover, but initially, in numbers applying, I think a number of my pupils did say, ‘We’re not going to bother to apply because we can’t afford it.’ So, if the cost remains so—. There is that element there as well. The figures could be skewed because there was perhaps a jump in certain elements of the national ensemble last year.
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[207] Ms Jones: Rŷm ni’n ffodus iawn yng Ngwynedd a Môn. Rŷm ni’n cael y gefnogaeth. Maen nhw’n rhoi arian i mewn i ni gynnal ein hensemble ni a hefyd y gweinyddu’n ganolog. Maen nhw’n gefnogol iawn i ni, chwarae teg.
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Ms Jones: We’re very fortunate in Gwynedd and Môn because we receive support. They support our ensemble financially and for central administration. They’re very supportive, fair play. |
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[208] Ms Bennett: Rwy’n meddwl bod y ffigwr yma—bod yna 125 yn yr ensemble cenedlaethol o Wynedd a Môn, sydd yn ffigwr rhyfeddol mewn gwirionedd.
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Ms Bennett: I think that the figure—that there are 125 in the national ensemble from Gwynedd and Môn, which is a fantastic figure to be frank. |
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[209] Bethan Jenkins: Ocê, diolch. A oes unrhyw gwestiynau eraill gan Aelodau. Lee.
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Bethan Jenkins: Okay, thank you. Are there any other questions from Members? Lee. |
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[210] Lee Waters: Just going back a little bit on the hub model in England that we heard about earlier. What are your views on whether that could be a useful innovation in Wales or a distraction?
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[211] Ms Bennett: To be honest, I don’t know enough about how it works on the ground level. Maybe Gareth can say something.
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[212] Mr Kirby: We’ve got consortia here in Wales and I think that would be the most sensible, rather than reinventing something new to come in. I think the hubs—again, I don’t know too much about them—have extensive partnerships, I think, don’t they, in the hubs in England so that they will work with—?
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[213] Lee Waters: They’re not just local authorities.
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[214] Mr Kirby: No. And I think they initially went out to tender, didn’t they? So, I think they had conservatoires that came on board with local authorities to do that. But, again, working with the hubs would be a way to do it, but again we don’t have the same number of conservatoires and perhaps professional organisations that England have, spread out across Wales, that would be able to function in that way. I know there are different opera companies dotted all around England that they were able to tap into as far as the variety of hubs are concerned. Perhaps the Welsh National Opera would only have so far that they would be able to go, do you know what I mean, pan-Wales, and those other organisations?
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[215] Ms Bennett: Can I come in on this because I think, interestingly, and idiosyncratically, maybe, in our area, it could work very well because we’ve got several organisations there in addition to the Gwasanaeth Ysgolion William Mathias music service. We also have the music centre, which is based in Galeri, Caernarfon, which does operate for the whole community and we’ve got about 400 children who come in for the private lessons. They are from families who can afford it, but the more talented ones also get bursaries to help them with their studies. It would be a wonderful thing because in our area—. And there’s not much money anywhere really, compared with some places in England, where there are hubs, but anything that would get the different organisations together across the board, would be a great asset, I think. Also, within Gwynedd, we’ve got the pilot scheme, which is experimental in many ways—what is called ‘Codi’r To’, which is based on El Sistema—of taking a whole class of children in two schools in very deprived areas in Caernarfon and Bangor and giving them instruments and teachers to teach the whole class, not primarily for the education of music, but to extend their experiences and, not improve, but enrich their lives and what they learn from that experience will also help their education generally. It is quite an interesting experiment. But, you know, all these organisations tend to go through the same kind of funders, in different trust funds. There’s a lot of entrepreneurial work going on as well, which might have been included if we had been looking at a different way, like hubs. I don’t know enough about how the hubs in England work, but I can see that there may be benefits there.
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[216] Lee Waters: Okay. Diolch.
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[217] Bethan Jenkins: Ocê, grêt. Diolch yn fawr iawn ichi am roi tystiolaeth ger ein bron. Mae’n siŵr y bydd gennych ddiddordeb mewn gweld yr hyn sydd yn digwydd wrth i’r ymchwiliad fynd yn ei blaen, a byddwn ni’n cadw mewn cysylltiad, wrth gwrs. Diolch yn fawr iawn ichi am ddod yma heddiw.
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Bethan Jenkins: Thank you very much for giving your evidence today. I’m sure you’d be interested in seeing what happens as the inquiry continues. We will keep in touch with you. Thank you very much for coming today. |
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[218] Ms Bennett: Diolch yn fawr iawn am wneud yr adolygiad yma. Mae’n bwysig dros ben.
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Ms Bennett: Thank you for undertaking this review. It’s very important. |
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[219] Bethan Jenkins: Y cyhoedd sydd wedi penderfynu. Diolch.
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Bethan Jenkins: Well, the public decided upon it. Thank you.
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Cynnig o dan Reol
Sefydlog 17.42 i benderfynu gwahardd y cyhoedd ar gyfer eitemau 5 a
6 |
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Cynnig: |
Motion:
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bod y pwyllgor yn penderfynu gwahardd y cyhoedd ar gyfer eitemau 5 a 6 yn unol â Rheol Sefydlog 17.42(vi). |
that the committee resolves to exclude the public from items 5 and 6 in accordance with Standing Order 17.42(vi).
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Cynigiwyd y cynnig.
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[220] Bethan Jenkins: Rydym ni’n symud ymlaen nawr at eitem 4, y cynnig o dan Reol Sefydlog 17.42 i benderfynu gwahardd y cyhoedd ar gyfer eitemau 5 a 6. A ydy pawb yn hapus gyda hynny?
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Bethan Jenkins: Let’s move on now to item 4, the motion under Standing Order 17.42 to resolve to exclude the public for items 5 and 6. Is everyone in agreement?
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[221] Dai Lloyd: Bodlon.
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Dai Lloyd: I’m content. |
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[222] Bethan Jenkins: Diolch yn fawr.
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Bethan Jenkins: Thank you very much.
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Derbyniwyd y cynnig.
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Daeth rhan gyhoeddus y cyfarfod i ben am
11:06. |
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