AH: Today, I’m really pleased to be speaking with the team at Dorset Music Service and Leeds Beckett University, who’ve been developing a music and wellbeing training programme for primary school staff to holistically support young people’s emotional health and learning. So welcome Clair, Pili and Ten. I wonder whether you’d like to introduce yourselves and briefly say how you’re involved in the programme.
CM: Well, I’m Clair McColl, and I’m the strategic lead for Dorset Music Service.
PL: I am Pili Lopez. I am the Inclusion Project Manager for Dorset Music Service, and have been involved alongside Clair from the start as well.
TM: And I’m Tenley Martin, or Ten as I go by, and I’m a senior lecturer in music performance at Leeds Beckett University, but my research area is on music and wellbeing, music outreach, and community music, and I am collaborating on this project, sort of from a research and impact standpoint, and I think we’re going to talk a bit more about that later, how I’ve gotten involved here.
AH: Yeah, fascinating. So wonderful to have a university involved with the music service. That’s brilliant. I’m looking forward to hearing more. So can you start by telling me how you came to be involved in this kind of wellbeing work as a music service, and how did this particular programme of work come about.
CM: I almost don’t want to give you the complete history of the last sort of seven years, but I realise it is, I think I’m about a week away from it being seven years since I took on the leadership role at Dorset Music Service. And it feels that soon after we kick started the development of our inclusion strategy, you know, as was on the national agenda [for England]. We got some youth music funding, and worked with wonderful Dr Phil Mullen. It was just such a wonderful foundation for me coming into this role and coming into the service, which had been a very traditional music service. That really kick started things. Then, of course, within a year, we had the pandemic, where I think we don’t need to go over all the lessons we learned there, but especially about wellbeing, and perhaps, you know, the importance of artistic output and music and everything else to sort of help people cope with all of that. And it felt that around that time, so when I made a connection with a local partner organisation who introduced us to Professor Nigel Osborne, if you remember Anita, I remember you were interested in that. That was a key piece of the puzzle, purely by fluke, that we began this learning and conversation and exploration with this incredible expert. Yeah, effectively, sort of trauma informed practice and how he was out there using music in literally, sort of war-torn settings, and his focus was music and the wellbeing of children in those contexts. And please, you know, go and look him up, he’s an incredible chap. We haven’t chatted for a while because he’s literally spent all of his time off in the Ukraine and, goodness knows where else in recent years. So through that, it just started to snowball. It just felt like our inclusion strategy work, the things we were learning with Nigel Osborne, which was about regulation and playlists and just understanding that music could be used as a vehicle. And of course, alongside that was just the obvious needs within our community. It’s like, it’s sort of shorthand to say, Oh, there’s a mental health crisis amongst our young people. But I think the volume and different types of learning that certainly I’ve experienced as an individual and a leader, and then we’ve experienced as a team, through doing all this work and doing all this collaborative work, led us to where we are. You know, there are other important milestones, like the Changing Tracks work, again that Anita was involved with, but all of that, the creative musical nurture group initiative, and the fact that, you know, many partner music services were working in that way and having great success and demonstrating impact, it just became quite clear that this using music as a vehicle to achieve multiple outcomes. That’s become my new favorite thing, the efficiency. We can achieve musical learning here, and we can support positive wellbeing. And you know, we might get into the specifics. You know, this isn’t therapy. It’s not music therapy. We’ve resisted using the word even therapeutic approach, just because it starts to blur the lines. So this holistic idea, yeah, there’s probably a bigger headline thing that’s just been in my mind really recently, this idea that people are scared of being a musician, or don’t identify as a musician, and are scared of music and of being judged. And I just want to jump up and down and say, if you’re a human being, you’re musical, like we sure have done a good job of making it gosh darned difficult for people and children to access something that is as simple as walking and talking and breathing, you know, and it’s as available to us as that. But you know, it sounds funny being a music service leader saying this, but wow, we’ve built all these structures and organisations that get to gatekeep and determine whether or not we can access this. And I think this programme almost feels like, let’s take it right back to basics and really make this accessible for all and achieve two things at once. If we can have calmer, happier young people and staff, then hopefully all that musical and other learning can can take place from a positive place, for sure, but there you go, I’ll stop blithering, but that’s like the gospel according to Clair.
AH: That’s brilliant, Clair, because I know that you’ve done so much work as a service in this area over the last seven years, and I was wondering how you’d even begin to start to explain that or summarise it. So that is absolutely great. I think that gives us all we need to know. Really wonderful. Pili, I wonder if you wanted to say anything specifically then about how that moved into this programme, that sort of strategic approach, and that’s kind of understanding of actually, this is something that should be central to music service delivery.
PL: Yes. So from that fantastic context that Clair has given, one of the decisions in Dorset Music Service, which was at the time they have lead organisation, was to create a new post, which is the one I took on at the end of 2020 which is Inclusion Project Manager. And as Clair already mentioned, I worked alongside Changing Tracks quite a lot that first year, because their work was trailblazing, really, in this field, and …
AH: Do you want to briefly say what Changing Tracks was? I’m aware that we’re talking in shorthand and for a lot of people, they might not know what Changing Tracks was.
PL: So Changing Tracks was a Youth Music funded project, which was headed by, amongst others, the wonderful Michael Davidson, and that promoted inclusion in music hubs, basically in many different ways, basically upskilling us all, really all, all the first inclusion project managers, and through a lot of online delivery and networking groups and a specific projects, such as the one that Clair mentioned, the creative music nurture groups. Changing Tracks provided a fantastic baseline for an inclusive practice to be part of all music hubs in England. Now, the creative music nurture group project put us into contact and introduced us to the MATES model, which we use in music in citizenship, and that is a model about emotional regulation and how to implement it in music delivery, and we adopted that with open hands, and we upskill a lot of our workforce. And then, as it happened, I was so interested in it that I decided to develop my personal practice and took part of a course in Leeds Beckett University, and Ten will talk about that which also uses that model. So Ten will talk about that later. But that is the link, really, of making the music experience, a holistic experience, and experience that helps the children’s wellbeing.
AH: So that brings me on to talk to Ten. So that’s where the connection was made. That’s fantastic. So you went on a training course, you met Ten, and then what happened? How’d the partnership come about?
TM: So thanks for that lead in [Laughs]. The partnership actually grew out of another research project I was working on at the time, which involved the training Pili is discussing. So she came up to lead spec it to take part in a Musicians Without Borders training programme that I was hosting, and they use MATES as one of their frameworks. And part of my research in that was looking at how the participants of that training were using the things that they were learning in their own work. I was on sabbatical at the time, so I had a little bit of flexibility in my work schedule. So I traveled down to Dorset to interview Pili and learn more about the work that DMS was doing in schools. And having lived in the North for my entire time living in this country, I didn’t even know where Dorset was until I got on a train. I was like, oh, that’s where I’m going to the end of this train line then right? So while I was there, I attended one of the early ELSA music CPD sessions, and it immediately struck me that there were some really interesting parallels with the kinds of questions I was exploring in my research, particularly around participatory music making and wellbeing. So that visit really became the starting point for the collaboration, and we began thinking about how the practical work happening in Dorset could connect with research I was doing around how music activities support wellbeing and develop what I call in my work nonmusical competencies, such as competence, emotional regulation and social connection. So in the project in mic, my role has mainly been to help shape the conceptual and research framework, and that’s included working with Pili and the team to develop the training model, connecting music activities to wellbeing frameworks, co-delivering some of the training sessions and helping to design the feedback and evaluation process so we can gather evidence about how the approach is working in practice. So I’ve also been involved in analysing some of the feedback and thinking about how the findings can be shared more widely, both within education networks and through research and advocacy, so the learning from the project can inform practice beyond Dorset. So it’s really been like a collaborative process where practice in schools and research at the University have been informing each other as the programme develops.
AH: Fantastic. So you mentioned ELSA’s when you went down to visit Dorset, the music service was already working with ELSA’s, which are emotional learning support assistants? So I don’t think they’re called that in every county, and in fact, they may not even exist in every county, I’m not sure. So can you tell me more about that, because obviously they’re connected to the educational psychology service. So it’s quite unusual for a music service to have anything to do with an educational psychology service. So if you can talk to me a little bit about how did you get to connect with them and find out what they were concerned about.
CM: I think the correct title is actually Emotional Literacy Support Assistant.
AH: Yes, yes, of course it is.
CM: I think that that’s an interesting distinction. There’s a quote, I really love Billy Bragg, the wonderful social justice musical legend and Dorset resident. There’s a quote I got from him from an interview, and it’s just ’empathy is the currency of music’. That blew my mind. See exactly. Anita and I often discuss nice writing and great words, but what an enormously complex thing in just a few words. That’s almost the jumping off point. It’s like we’re trying to figure out ways to support young people with their feelings and emotions, perhaps in a country, you know, where we haven’t been great at doing that historically, and then we’re really trying to get kids to engage with music and be creative. And so you just go, huh? But it starts to feel quite obvious. But I think that you know that that is just to us, or to, you know, to us that are in this world, and viewing it through this lens. What I’m struggling to remember, and I have to pass on to Pili, is actually that first conversation. It’s like we knew this had legs, and we knew from the previous work, again, the little dabblings that we’d done with Nigel Osborne, and shout out to a lovely Dorset colleague called David Burns in a primary school in Bridgeport, who ran with those ideas so much and really fleshed out how this could be delivered. You know, in small ways, it was, I think, though there was an example where there wasn’t a huge amount of music happening within the curriculum, and so he just happened to be someone that was looking at, So how can we sort of sneak it in in between? Or how can this be a lesson warm up? Or how can this be a calming down after lunch activity where that emotional regulation was happening as well as a bit of musical appreciation or learning of some kind? But yeah, then I think we just said, Pili, please go and talk to the ed psych team.
PL: Yeah, so I had to revisit it. I didn’t have it in my head. Exactly what happened is at the start of 2021, and that’s when we were in that funny second lockdown. Then Clair, as you know, she likes chatting with a lot of people, so she somehow found herself chatting with educational psychologist in some kind of meeting and find out they had a wellbeing for education return fund. And through that, she already had links with Nigel Osborne and said, Oh, hang on a minute we can do something here. So that’s how our link with the education psychologist team started.
AH: Was it anything to do with the structure of the local authority that you’re in a department that includes the music service and the educational psychologist, or was it just a complete coincidence you happen to be at an event?
PL: We are part of the Children’s Services of Dorset council. So Clair is managed by a senior leader in children’s service, and she’s included in many different meetings. And Clair, being Clair, obviously she wants to go along, because, you know, these opportunities come up, like this one.
CM: Yeah, I thought to me just briefly and for context, because yes, I am, I’m a late, diagnosed neurodivergent person. And so what it’s like, one of those strengths. I almost can’t help myself, but it’s like, I will find the links. I will spot the patterns. Yeah, and I like chatting to people and getting straight to the point. So I think sometimes you just go, Oh, hello. Do you ever use music or creativity? It’s like, just get in, just find out what’s possible. Yeah, I think, I think that that is was so good when, when you have got the chance to make connections with other teams and understand the problems they’re trying to solve. Because what we know is no one’s going to think, Oh, yeah, I’ll ask the music service about that, because we understand what the perception is. But once the ball was rolling, once we convinced a few people, it really has had that sort of snowball effect of people understand that music and creative work could be supporting other outcomes. But yes, back to how on earth did we get it off the ground.
PL: So February 2021, is when we started to work alongside Dorset education psychologist team on this wellbeing for education return. Nigel Osborne delivered quite a few CPD, online CPD sessions for educational settings. David Burns was included as well, as Clair said. We sort of through that, yeah, we said, what about working with ELSA’s? Because we knew the educational psychologist team is the one leading on ELSA training and support in Dorset. So that was like, Oh, why don’t we work with that workforce? Nobody ever thinks about them. You know, other than, let’s train them, they do it. And then education psychologist team was very open they, I mean, a big shout out to them. They always understood us. They really always went with us and cooperated all along. So they said, Okay, well, what do you suggest then? So we said, well, can we be part of their initial training when they come on board and they said, Well, why not? Let’s try it.
AH: Amazing. Just tell me exactly what these emotional literacy support assistants do. Who do they work with in the schools? Are they one-to-one support assistants, or do they support a group of children in the classroom?
PL: So their ELSAs are TAs and they are trained during six full days to become ELSAs. And their life in schools looks very different from one setting to another. It just depends on the SLT how much time they give her or him to do this role. So it could be in a setting they might have five ELSAs working one day each, and in another setting, they might have one ELSA at work in one afternoon. The way it works is, anybody in the setting can refer pupils to the ELSAs, and there is a referral form. And the reasons for the referral of any pupil in the setting, it can be any key stage, are six. One is understanding emotions, emotional regulation, self-esteem, loss and bereavement, relationships and friendships, or the last one is social skills and problem solving. So any children that need specific support in these areas can be referred to ELSAs and they work, maybe one-to-one, maybe group work. Small, very small group work is decided by the ELSA and the one that referred the child. And normally they have a limited amount of sessions to work with a specific child, 6-10 sessions, they might work for longer. So the ELSAs are equipped with knowledge and a toolkit when they are trained that they can develop through the years, through the supervision meetings and their own interest. So our idea was we want music to be part of their kit. So that’s how it started. So both Clair and me were part of that first one in November 2022, and we’ve been part of it every time since then. And then, after that first year, I requested a meeting with them, a leading team, and said, Well, would ELSAs like to carry on training or musical skills? Or do they just want to have a little taster at the start? Can you please ask them? I said, so they did. They asked for their feedback, and they said, Yes, we want some more training in music. So the first level one was delivered when Ten happened to visit Dorset.
AH: Ah, right, okay, so the initial training for ELSAs in Dorset now always involves music. Is that right?
PL: Yes, every year.
AH: And then the continuing training is now beginning to involve music as well?
PL: Yeah, and that’s optional. They don’t get any other training in anything else. It’s just the music part that we as a music service have been funding and, you know, resourcing, and this will be the third year we’re doing so. And obviously from early it was with the collaboration of Leeds Beckett University, with Ten Martin.
AH: And what does the training consist of?
PL: As you can imagine, the ones that choose to take part, they have some affinity with music, but most of them don’t really have, let’s say, technical skills in music. So they again, most of them don’t consider themselves musicians at all. So the level one training, which is the one the first one we started with, is a two-hour session. So it’s very short and sweet. Face-to-face, it needs to be face-to-face. And basically there is an introduction to the mate’s emotional regulation model as a framework on how then we can use music activities related to the different keys to the MATES model, because MATES model talks about keys to help oneself or to help children, to come out of these regulation. Yes, so there’s five different keys, and we relate them to musical activities that the ELSAs can use.
AH: Do you want to tell us a little bit more about the MATES model and how therefore you use that in the training sessions?
PL: So yes, the MATES model explains emotional regulation as a house, and the regulating state is in the house. But sometimes we dysregulate, and we might go to the attic or to the basement. We all do this, and then we go back to the living room and function in a better state to be executive, to live our lives. MATES suggest some keys to help those that get a little bit stuck, either in the attic or in the basement, how we can help them to come back or help ourselves, a self-help tool as well. Yeah, so how we can help? And they are the MATES. So the M is for mind, the A is for air, the T is for trees, the E is for expression, and the S is for stretch. I must say, all the ELSAs find this model absolutely fantastic. They have been training emotional regulation in their initial training. But when they discovered this model, they said, Oh, this makes so much sense. I’m going to use it for everything. You know, it’s fantastic to see their eyes like, Wow!
AH: Great, isn’t it? Because it helps children to understand it a bit better as well, I would imagine.
PL: Yeah. And this model was created by two, let me see their names, psychologists.
TM: Roby and Abeles [Dr Roby Abeles and Salene Souza], one of them’s Portuguese, one of them’s Australian.
PL: And it’s, you know, not only music, obviously, it’s just in any, any use that it has, but we related to music. That’s the next bit of the training is we related to, So how? How does the key mind look in music? How can we get those children in a different mindset, basically in a in a more functioning mindset? So we suggest activities such as listening to certain types of music, or doing some body percussion games, some very simple or joining into some strong rhythmic activity with chair percussion, for example, some very easy to to lead activities.
TM: Mind is basically about disrupting the negative thoughts that are causing the dysregulation in some way, and those activities are associated with that.
PL: So for other keys, you know, air is got a very straight link with music, which is about breathing, and it’s totally related to singing or breathing to music as well.
AH: And there is more information on your website, isn’t there? So I will include all the information in the show notes about MATES, the information on your website, etc. Is there a theory of change, or are there any outcomes that you’re evaluating against? I’m sure there are, if you’ve got a university researcher involved. So like, love to hear more about that in terms of the impact of the CPD on young people.
TM: Yeah, there is a basic theory of change that underpins the Project. It starts from a fairly simple observation that schools are facing rising emotional and wellbeing needs in pupils, while at the same time, access to creative activities like music has been declining. The question behind music and citizenship was whether obviously music could help address that gap in a practical way. So our theory of change has three main steps. So it’s training the non-specialist staff, particularly ELSAs, through CPD sessions, to use simple and accessible music activities within their wellbeing work. Those staff, part two, begin to use participatory music making activities in those sessions with pupils, things like rhythm work, listening, movement, songwriting, drawing to music, etc. And then part three is, through these experiences, pupils begin to develop the non-musical competencies that I mentioned, things like emotional regulation, confidence, communication, sense of belonging. And those competencies then influence broader outcomes, such as pupils being calmer, more able to self-regulate, more willing to communicate with teachers and peers, and often more engaged in school. So what’s important is that the musical activity isn’t just decorative or vaguely therapeutic. The musical process itself, so listening, improvising, co-ordinating with others is what cultivates those competencies. So the theory of change really is that when staff are trained to incorporate these simple music activities into their existing wellbeing practices, those activities help pupils develop competencies like the emotion regulation, competence, communication, and those are the capacities that ultimately support wellbeing and engagement in school.
AH: And so have you had enough time in order to be able to write a first evaluation report or do a first analysis?
TM: I would say that we are constantly collecting feedback, as we’ll probably talk about maybe in one of your later questions, like, one of the challenges is we are and Dorset is training ELSAs, there’s no way that we can actually be in the room when they’re seeing the pupils, because that, obviously, for a lot of reasons, wouldn’t be appropriate. So we rely on the ELSAs reporting back to us, like how they’ve used it, or teachers or heads of school saying, like differences that it might have made in the school setting. And because of the nature of those individuals jobs, it’s kind of a slow burn to collect some of that data. So we’ve got quite a lot like we’ve got some really nice stories, and we’ve done the Music Mark presentation. I’ve done a recent article in which Dorset is one of the ones that I’ve talked about that we’re getting enough where we’re starting to be able to put it together, but we know it’s working based on absolutely amazing stories that we’ve heard from people.
AH: So there’s no kind of metric scale used with the children, because often with things like the NHS, they might use things like the strengths and difficulties questionnaire. And so you’re focusing on qualitative feedback from the school and from the assistants themselves.
TM: Yeah. I mean, right now, that’s what we are. We’ve considered trying to figure out a way to use, like, one of the scales, but I think that’s not something that we would personally be able to enact in that setting. So that is, again, going to the ELSAs and saying, Can you do can you do this for us? It’s possible that it’s maybe something we want to look at in the in the future, but right now, I mean, we do get, we are we do send out kind of a Google Form questionnaire, and also the educational psychologists are talking about it in their supervision meetings and trying to collect some of that data for us, which was actually a really big breakthrough, was getting buy in on this and to as something that they just, they will just have a chat about when they’re in those supervisory sessions with the ELSAs.
AH: That’s amazing, because one of my questions was going to be, well, are there any conflict and tensions between what you want to know about and understand and the way you want to collect information and the way the educational psychologists might, again, going back to NHS, sometimes there can be a conflict.
TM: So first of all, that’s one of the things that I’m growing to specialise in, is explaining, like, the benefits of music in a way that people in STEM in science and engineering, in education, but not music, can understand why these are beneficial. So that’s something that I’ve been working on, being able to do in my own research, is but we were quite lucky in that we got an invitation last May, to speak with the educational psychologists in I guess it was one of their like everyone from the entire team was in this one meeting, and we were invited to come in and talk for 45 minutes about the project. And it was really beneficial. And Pili had them singing, and I think that they really got a grasp as to what we were trying to do, and that’s when we really got quite a lot more buy-in, and that’s when they agreed to do some of the to speak about it in the supervisions. I think that they would, they would like more data, but, and that’s why that they’ve agreed to help us collect some of it, because we explained the difficulties in this. Yeah. I wouldn’t say it’s a it’s a conflict, really, or a tension, I think, is we both acknowledge that, yeah, we would actually quite like to collect more data, be that qualitative data or maybe some kind of quantitative scale.
PL: Just to add that, the educational psychologist ELSA team, so they have two dedicated psychologists to the ELSAs. They are very much aware of the challenges of the ELSAs roles. You know, they lack capacity. They have they you know that one of the comments that comes constantly come back in the feedback is, I don’t have time to plan properly. I don’t have time to feedback. I don’t, you know, they, they are not giving time for that as TAs that generally, some of them might, but generally, you know, I don’t think there is a conflict in between them and us in terms of this data that we all want to have, but it’s like it comes really slowly.
AH: Yeah, so what would you say the most valuable things that you’ve learned from this work, and have there been any surprises for you?
TM: One of the most valuable things that I’ve learned from this work are ways and means of kind of what I just said, translating music and wellbeing research and pedagogy into forms that are accessible to non-music specialists. A lot of what musicians and music educators understand intuitively like about rhythm, listening, expression and emotional regulation needs to be reframed and experienced so that people without this musical training can confidently use it in their own work with young people. Another really interesting discovery has been about how creatively some of the ELSAs have been able to take those ideas and adapt them within their own practice. Like once they feel competent with the tools, many of them start using music in ways that we hadn’t anticipated or imagined, combining it with other wellbeing activities, developing their own variations and often fused with other therapy techniques that maybe they’ve been taught someplace else, and finding approaches that really work for the pupils that they support. And I have to say, partnership with Dorset Music Service for me, has been fantastic. They’ve been really open to experimentation and committed to exploring ways we could advocate and collect feedback on the project, and their insight into how schools actually function and how ELSAs support works in practice has been invaluable and made the project stronger. So yeah.
PL: So for us, the joy of this project, let’s say, is to find out validation to what we instinctively thought is the correct thing to do, which is to work with everybody in a setting, not just to work with the traditional ones we normally reach to in music services, generally music subject leads, or to the music teachers. Now there is a lot of value to work with the whole of the staff team in the educational settings. And how to do it has been a developed, you know, has been developing, and it has been amazing to have the input of Ten and a university that their research perspective and all their knowledge, and the educational psychologist team. So it has been one of the best collaboration projects we run, from my point of view. Is very authentic, is very relevant, is very real, is not in anybody’s head, is in the practice. And we are collaborating all the time, and we are pointing to each other. It’s like, Oh, have you thought of that? So it’s thinking out of the box all the time, which I, you know, I think we’d so need. And within that Ten touched onto this, but it’s again, corroboration to the belief that most of the population wants music in their lives, and they appreciate music in their lives, and they don’t call themselves musicians, but when you give them a little starter of, But maybe you can use music in your practice, they’re going, Oh yes, that makes sense, and they do it.
AH: It’s so simple, isn’t it? But that it’s just so amazing that it’s given people permission, and you shouldn’t need permission to be musical, but people do.
CM: Absolutely. This conversation is just so pertinent because, yeah, I was having this discussion thinking more about the older age group of sort of the youth work context, and young professionals, and these same things are coming up that, yeah, it’s a shame that people need permission and that they don’t relate their experience of music, that they have as a human being, and their work in school with young people that that’s common, that’s not just emotional literacy, support assistant. I love the fact that Tenley was saying about musicians understand this intuitively, or at least they have developed that through their musical life. But actually, we all have that and it’s the experience as well. Music and music education has like a PR problem or something, people think it’s something that it’s not, and it’s actually, yeah, available to us all. I wanted to bring up the thing about support, because we’re talking about breathing, talking about regulatory breathing, we’re talking about body percussion activities, and again, as a neurodivergent person, and all the rest of it. But I have been receiving support recently, and these are the methods I’m being taught. It’s like, this is not, this isn’t crazy woo-woo land. One of the things about regulating is to sort of hit your like the top of your chest, how to sort of calm the Vagus nerve and all of those things. And I learned about the Vagus nerve four or five years ago when I first did the MATES training. I have to shout out like Simon Locke and the West of England hub, because we teamed up with them on some CPD early doors. So I learned that four or five years ago. It took me until about six months ago to realise that’s exactly what I needed as an individual, because I personally hadn’t made that connection. But these really are, these are established light-touch interventions or self-help tools that we’re sort of disseminating far more widely, but there’s something about just unclenching. And I really do mean it’s like people feel so tense about music, and it’s really about just relax. This is a method of developing the relationship with the young person and having a relationship when that young person might be in a moment of crisis and they really need a connection to a safe person you know, to ground them. And by establishing this work, or even just talking about, this is my favorite type of music, it’s just such a way in to connecting to human beings and to develop that sense of belonging and acceptance that, yeah, it just feels really underutilised. So going forward, I’m sure I’ve got about 17 as ever, 17 different ideas about how this can be proliferated. But I’m really interested in what does this look like for an older age group or in different contexts? And just yesterday, I was in a meeting about, you know, the Dorset creative health strategy, of which I am, you know, I have mentioned several offers, you know, the creative musical nurture groups as a primary school based context. There’s also a kind of music mentoring offer that we’ve had quite small-scale, but the young people we have been working with have seen enormous benefit. And then, yeah, this work with our emotional literacy assistance says there’s lots of models to build on. So I’m really excited about where this could go next.
AH: I’m excited to watch what happens next. So you might feel you’ve already answered this question. My next question was going to be, what have been the biggest challenges and the most pleasing outcomes of the work so far?
PL: So the main challenge at the moment is the working life of ELSAs. Their lack of capacity to work with us, because we really want to work with them, have their feedback and evolve all the time with them, because, as Ten said previously, they take on what we give them, and they develop it. And so if we could have, instead of a few ELSAs doing that, a lot of ELSAs doing that, that would be fantastic. So that’s the main challenge. Also, we want to bring this outside just the primary the educational settings, and perhaps working with youth workers. We have started some conversations with early years. So as we extend the project, we will see.
TM: I was just going to say more broadly, it’s just about staff capacity in schools, and decisions about how things are implemented often depend on senior leadership priorities. So there’s a lot of dependency on whether or not the SLT has bought into this idea.
AH: Interesting, that’s a challenge for all of us, always in music education.
CM: The capacity problem isn’t going anywhere. You know, it really is an enormous challenge. The individual staff just don’t have the headspace or the capacity to take up the offers. I don’t know what the silver bullet is, but I’m ever optimistic. I sometimes hear my team going, but no, they’re just not buying it. They’re not turning up to this. You know, something else was prioritised at the last minute. What can we try next to make that no longer the case? Because I think we really understand the challenges that teachers, SLTs, TAs, everyone has in school, and we know that this work isn’t necessarily the silver bullet, but goodness, it can have a positive impact. Might help staff as well. It could lead to a much more sort of rich musical culture across that whole school that includes families and community like it really could be so many things, if we could just get everyone to slow down enough to really hear it. And I think, again, experience it. I think that is a crucial thing, the fact that humming a tune can calm you down. I think until you’ve I think I’d like to sit in a room with really stressed out SLT members get, you know, do a few exercises like that, so that they experience it for themselves, and perhaps that might change their hearts and minds, I think.
PL: To tag along to that, I would like to finish with an opportunity because of the changes that have been given through the education white paper and the SEN changes. Projects like this, have to tag along that and make sure we are heard and we are part of the changes. So we, you know, we are very well placed, I think, to advocate, not just with the settings and expertise, but also with our own teams like endorse with children’s service. They really listen to us because of the nature relationship we have, and hopefully they’ll bring us along in the changes that will be happening in the next three, five, ten years, and what we do in music, in citizenship, will be very relevant, as well as other projects.
AH: Absolutely and thinking about policy and the white paper, you’ll no doubt have spotted that they’ve put a budget towards senior leadership team wellbeing. Apparently, it works at 40 pounds per head teacher, so it isn’t much, but obviously a lot of head teachers won’t take that up. And I don’t know the detail of it, but there’s so much potential there, and I’d love to talk more about that, but I just need to bring us to a close now, unfortunately. So where can people find out more? And if there are other music services interested in doing something similar, do you have any resources, or do you offer consultancy that can help?
PL: In terms of resources at the moment, there is the free music and wellbeing online resource, which sits in the Dorset Music Service web page. In terms of collaborating or expanding to other music services, we are very much open to do so. In fact, after the conference in November, we have been reached by Essex music service, for example, that they, you know, we conversations with them, and Leeds Beckett University is very keen to develop the consultancy side of bringing this to as many music services as possible. Obviously, we are part of this making Dorset, and will support it growing if there is a role for us, obviously.
AH: So it’s just reach out to you and start a discussion?
PL: Yes, just come to either Dorset Music Service or Leeds Beckett University, Tenley Martin.
CM: I think we know we haven’t sort of invented a wheel here. You know this is something that is known and understood, and all those services that are involved in the Changing Tracks work. This is familiar. I think there’s just something about, perhaps a long-term goal of sort of changing the perception of what musical learning can look like, and be, like its role in school life. It’s almost that bigger picture idea. We would just like these things to be more commonplace, and sort of have them recognised because they are both musically valuable, but also just supportive and helpful. It could be that first access opportunity for some young musicians, who knows? Instead of thinking of this as consultancy, I think I’m really conscious that this isn’t a product to sell, and this isn’t ours. It’s like we’ve tapped, we’re just, we’ve just sort of highlighted a slightly different way of doing it, and have demonstrated its impact. So I think we’re so interested in having other conversations. But to be honest, even you know, it feels like we already do connect. You know, both nationally and regionally, it feels like we have great relationships with other organisations that are interested in similar areas of work. Yeah, I can think of the Live Music Now work and Alex Lupo that, you know, they’ve got HRC funding and all sorts. There’s real momentum behind that. So it’s just kind of, hey, anyone else come and join our gang? And yeah, maybe we can all collaborate on something at a future Music Mark event, because it feels like we’re in sync with what’s being asked of schools and the way in which we’re all being asked to support young people and families going forward. So yeah, why don’t we go and see if we really can use the power of music to change lives? Because I heard that somewhere. I heard that. I think that’s what we’re all meant to be trying to do here.
AH: It does feel like a quite a positive time, dare I say it? It’s been challenging always for music services. It has been very hard last few years, hasn’t it? But there’s a lot of change at government level now, and it does feel as though there’s change in a lot of different areas, kind of wider areas than just the music education system as it used to be. Feels like there’s a little bit of breaking out of that music education system. So finally, I usually ask you to share either three practical pieces of advice or three calls to action for others working in music, for wellbeing, education or social justice. So things that you’d like to see happen in this area in the next few years, and I wondered if you’d like to respond to that?
TM: So I guess I would say, don’t be afraid to collaborate beyond your usual professional circles or sort of fields of interests. Some of the most interesting ideas can emerge when people from different areas of expertise start working together. And obviously you can see that in this project, bringing together music practitioners, educational psychologists and researchers have created a space where completely new approaches have been able to emerge.
AH: Love that. Thanks Ten.
PL: Yeah, music, not only in the curriculum, music as part of school life, including all staff, not just those that seem to have the expertise.
AH: Excellent.
CM: The short version is, I wish everyone would just unclench and enjoy.
AH: I’m just going to finish there, Clair.
CM: Exactly. Drop mic. I’ve written stop prioritising musician as such an elite role. And I think we could have a really interesting debate, are we all musicians, or at least, are we all musical like is that enough? Will that do? I just think there’s a big invisible barrier that perhaps, in some sections or some business models or some formats, there’s a need to preserve that elitism, whereas I’m a great advocate of the other thing of, really, let’s try and open this up, because this is for everyone, and can be so supportive. And if that barrier is, you know, is removed, then more young people will then go on to do all the advanced, wonderful technical learning, you know, and wonderful music making that we want them to. It might feel that it’s counterproductive, but I actually think by opening this up and really letting more people experience themselves and their own musicality and how helpful and healing and soothing it can be, then that’s ultimately going to lead to more music makers and more musicians further down the road.
AH: Great note to end on. Thank you Clair, and thank you Pili and Ten. That has been a fantastic conversation. I knew it would be. It’s been a joy to talk with you. Good luck with rolling out the programme, continuing the programme, expanding it into other areas. I know you’ll do great things. Thank you again.