The neuroscience researcher, educator, author and international advisor struggled to read as a child. Now she’s transforming how we advocate for music in schools, and her ripple effect is spreading worldwide. I spoke with Anita for my podcast recently – but if you prefer to read rather than listen, here’s the article version.
Dr Anita Collins laughs when I ask how she became one of the world’s leading advocates for music education. “Well it’s not a straight line,” she says from an Australian hotel, fresh off another flight to spread her message. “Where do I start?!”
But there’s a deeper story here – a childhood struggle that led to a long-term mission to share learning about music and its impact on the brain.
The accidental advocate
Anita didn’t set out to become an advocacy expert. She was training teachers at university when the rules changed in Australia – suddenly, she needed a PhD to keep her job. For nine months, she read everything she could get her hands on, searching for something that would really speak to her as a topic for her studies. Then she found an article by a music educator who had asked four neuroscientists: “if you wanted music teachers to know about your research, what would you tell them?”
“I got to the end and I was furious,” Anita recalls. “I thought, I don’t need to know any of that stuff, but I do need to know this, this, this, and this. And I thought, well, maybe that’s my angels saying: this is your space, this is what you should be doing.”
So she started to explore the neuroscience of music. But then, three years into her PhD, she began to understand why she was really exploring the topic.
And that’s because, as a child, she couldn’t read properly. But she was hiding it, using tricks to mask her difficulties. Then something shifted. At age nine, someone placed a clarinet in her hands and taught her to read music. Nine months later, her reading had transformed.
“Ultimately, I realised that what I was trying to answer is, did learning a musical instrument change the trajectory of my life? Because it rewired my brain so that I could begin to read more effectively? I still struggle with it. Potentially, I’m dyslexic.”
That same question would eventually become her life’s work.
Beyond the music room
What perhaps makes Anita different from other music education advocates is her insistence that this isn’t really about music at all. “Take the music out of my title, and I’m a teacher, an educator,” she explains. “What I was seeing in the research was that in fact, they were showing the nature of all learning. They were just using music as a tool to help us understand that.”
Anita has spent her life exploring this research, and what it tells us about the value of music to learning, as well as the transferable skills it provides. Moving beyond the narrow view that “you only study music if you’re going to be a musician.”
The thorn, the belief, and the fuel
Anita has recently developed what she calls the ‘BBB+ method’ for advocacy – a systematic approach that starts with understanding resistance rather than dismissing it.
First comes the ‘thorn’ – that moment when someone says something that makes you, as a music educator, think “they just don’t get it.” Maybe it’s “my child’s not having fun anymore, they’re going to stop learning their instrument.” Your instinct might be to argue. Anita suggests pausing instead.
Next, she suggests, you need to identify the belief behind that thorn. What’s really driving this parent? Perhaps they’re feeling that lessons are a lot of money, and they need to see some ‘benefit ‘for their investment. Maybe they feel guilty that their child is finding learning music difficult.
Then she says, think about the fuel – what’s feeding that belief? Anita has discovered that in the UK, only about 20% of people have had what she calls “a meaningful music learning experience” in childhood. “I flip that statistic around,” she says, “and I think, eight out of every 10 people I meet have not had that experience. So when I speak about music learning … they don’t know what I’m talking about.”
This can change everything. That’s because you can see this person not as someone who dismisses music – but as someone who’s never had the chance to discover what you know so deeply. It becomes a true conversation and sharing of information, rather than a defensive position.
Anita says that understanding the immediate ‘pain’ or even the wider worldview that’s fueling the belief, helps us understand: “where to begin advocating and what language to use. If I’m dealing with a sporting person, it’s, you’ve got a team of rugby players. I’ve got a team of choristers. They have to work together to make formations, they run plays and things like that. My choristers have to follow me and follow each other, and they have to follow all the music. And there’s patterns and all sorts of things that have to happen in that for them to achieve their goal. It’s trying to get them to see that the two things are not wildly different.”
The performance of advocacy
Anita believes that music educators are uniquely positioned for advocacy, “because the more and more I’ve worked with them, they can read people … maybe this is our secret superpower? Because part of advocacy is reading the person and being curious about the person and then going, okay, how can I help you understand me and the thing that is most important to me?”
Performance is another superpower. “You channel this skill when you’re being a music teacher and a musician. So take that skill and realise that, when you’re sitting with three members of the board, you are performing. And I think again, we have a skill that we need to recognise and transfer across into our advocacy and not feel like we shouldn’t be saying these things, or we’re selling an idea. Because we’re just educating and helping people to understand something they don’t understand yet, and we’re going to change children’s lives by doing it. View advocacy as performance, and great things will happen.”
The long game
Anita is pragmatic about the length of time it takes to make real change. But change is happening. In Australia, it’s happening at policy level as well as in the national conversation. Anita believes that now, many more people in Australia are able to not only say that music is good for young people’s education, but specifically, why.
“And we have to say it over and over again in different ways, in different formats, and it will land. Australia is a perfect example of that: it’s landed.”
She reminds us that policy changes come about as a result of approaching the problem from different angles at the same time. “it’s doing something from the top and the bottom. And if I think about it, that’s often how revolutions happen. Something happens at the top end, something happens down the bottom, and it comes together in the middle.”
It’s important also to reconsider who you bring to the table to make collective change, she says. “Instead of putting together a group of representative people, for example, someone from the exam board and someone from, the music educators, representative group, [in Australia] we specifically brought together people in the field who are big thinkers. People who really want to attack the problem and not represent themselves in that.”
The revolution is noisy – as well as quiet!
Perhaps Anita’s most practical advice is also the most simple: “Show how the sausage is made.” Too often, she says, music educators hide the learning process, only revealing the polished performance. But those eight out of ten people who’ve never experienced music learning need to see what actually happens behind the rehearsal room door.
Her solution? “Get instruments in their hands. Put out a whole bunch of extra percussion instruments, and invite the parents to play them. I’ve seen fathers turn into George of the Jungle when they get on the timpani!”
The revolution Anita is leading is happening one conversation at a time, one lightbulb moment at a time – in teacher training, in roundtables, at parents evenings. It’s not about hammering on doors or taking to the streets with banners. It’s about curiosity and empathy, conversation and learning. And it’s working.