Lord Lloyd Webber: don’t cry for this tory government
when i was eight or nine, or even ten years old — i forget — one music teacher at my school lent the class a violin each to take home for a weekend on the premise that if any of us took to the instrument, she’d sign us up for lessons.
i was excited to try one out, but scared to handle something so precious. i still feel guilt over the many items of my own that i lost or broke as a child; i’m surprised that my parents don’t remind me of this more often.
the thing is, i did take the violin and bow out of the case and try to play it, hoping i’d uncover a natural aptitude that i could leverage to get my parents to pay for lessons. but in my heart, i knew i would more likely break a string. and indeed, i did. when the following monday came to return them, i sneakily dumped mine in the music rooms without telling anyone. i forget if i got in trouble for it, but i felt so bad — i sensed snapped violin strings would be expensive to fix — that i absolutely would have taken a detention on the spot if i were given one, no complaints.
the violin was wasted on me from the moment i held it. but i retained a desire to learn to play an instrument in addition to singing — i envied musicians who could do both at the same time — and in hindsight, it probably was obvious that i would do so at some point. i wish i could say my first instrument was something cool or sexy. but in truth, like so many boys, it was the guitar. ah, the heteronormative pathway… classic.
i recount this tale as someone who attended a relatively fancy school at primary education level, rather than the sort of establishment that musical theatre impresario Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber thinks of when advocating for more classical instruments to be made available to pupils (LBC, 28 june). he also wrote in the Times (£wall):
children are increasingly being deprived of a classical music education and the chance to learn an instrument. classical music must not be the preserve of the rich. there should be a proper programme that makes music available to students in every school.
fine words from one of the nation’s most prominent patrons of the arts in the last 50 years. but why he thinks this government is going to do it, given all his lobbying efforts have thus far been — in his own words — ‘met with a vague fudgy nod’ is baffling.
their history speaks for itself. academic Jonathan Savage’s account of the policy and practice of music education in england under conservative party rule documents the incoherence of their plans. mass ‘academisation’, together with the introduction of free schools, gave many establishments both financial independence and the freedom to ‘set their own curriculum arrangements’ absent of the department for education and its regulatory sidekick ofsted enforcing the checks needed to prevent a consistent curricular offer across all state schools becoming ‘significantly weakened’.
it seems obvious that this would have doomed the government’s national music education hubs (aka mehs, an apt acronym) from the start. they have a remit to carry out four core roles set by arts council england, the first being ‘to ensure that every child aged 5–18 has the opportunity to learn a musical instrument (other than voice) through whole-class ensemble teaching programmes, ideally for a year (or a minimum of a term) of weekly tuition on the same instrument’. but the aforementioned lack of obligation to adhere to a standard ensures that the whole arrangement is afflicted by the classic british policy sensibility of sans teeth regulation. the musicians’ union noted as early as 2014 that:
schools are under pressure from the secretary of state for education to become autonomous, set their own curriculums and budgets and move away from local authority control and yet hubs are expected to engage with schools in their areas without any statutory obligation to do so in place.
what’s more, this is underpinned by two political decisions: 1) a narrowing of the curriculum around subjects that the government considers to be priority areas (english, mathematics and the sciences) and ‘things that can be supposedly easily quantified and measured’; and 2) austerity. the government claims it supports mehs to the tune of almost £80m annually, as they have done so since 2015. but by implication, they have been starving their own brainchild: in real terms the ‘minimum figure’ needed for running the hubs effectively should be closer to £100m today (Music Teacher Magazine, march 2022).
you’d think mehs would be the appropriate vehicle for fulfilling Lord Lloyd Webber’s wishes, and you’d think the former tory peer knows this already, so intimately connected as he was with the ruling party even before the formation of the hubs. but if even he could not effect change from his position of relative influence, what hope has he now? he may write:
whichever political party truly understands and embraces the importance of music in schools would get not just my vote but those of millions of parents proud to see what access to classical music has done for their children.
but only one promised the funding to meet his ambitions in their 2019 election manifesto, and it wasn’t the conservatives:
we will introduce an arts pupil premium to every primary school in england — a £160 million annual boost for schools to ensure creative and arts education is embedded in secondary education, and providing a pathway to grow our thriving creative sector.
twice as much money? to spend on frivolous things like instruments for our state-educated schoolkids? we can’t have that! they’ll probably ruin them anyway, so we shouldn’t bother. besides, the din of classical communism would deafen them, probably.
so here we are, with the country we deserve, the likes of Lord Lloyd Webber having sided with a party hell bent on impoverishing schools, setting political decisions in motion long before brexit and the pandemic and what have you. there is no alternative, we were told then, so there are no excuses now. the simple truth is that the conservative party scrooges the funding of the state school education that they are responsible for to cultivate musical or any other form of excellence, because they despise the children Lloyd Webber wants them to support. inequality is just as much a state of mind as anything else, and the tory-led british state loathes spending serious sums of money on anyone outside of their favoured wealth bracket without making them suffer first.
Lloyd Webber would have an easier time setting up a talent show for state schoolkids to gain scholarships to conservatoires. it could be a sequel to his ‘i’d do anything’ tv series. it could involve competitions such as making them literally sing for their supper. the successful ones might be admitted to orchestra bootcamp; the others gunged with stale gruel from a local foodbank.
otherwise, Lloyd Webber will get nowhere with his campaign. the composer may decry the total dominance of prep school alumni in classical music, and pledge to ‘never vote tory again’ because of their neglect of the arts, but it’s too late. they’ll deny any fault on their part, as they as do and have. to borrow a lowbrow phrase, i wonder if Lord Lloyd Webber ever gets the feeling he’s been cheated?