{"id":329071,"date":"2025-12-22T02:25:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T02:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/329071\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T02:25:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T02:25:07","slug":"singing-at-school-shouldnt-just-be-for-christmas-teachers-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/329071\/","title":{"rendered":"Singing at school shouldn’t just be for Christmas, teachers say"},"content":{"rendered":"

There has been a 25% drop in pupils studying GCSE music at schools in England over the last fifteen years, despite an uptick, external<\/a> in the most recent stats. <\/p>\n

That is partly down to the introduction of a progress measure for schools called the English Baccalaureate in 2010, which assessed schools based on how many pupils took English, maths, sciences, geography or history and a language – and how well they performed.<\/p>\n

The government recently announced that it would be changing the school curriculum<\/a> in England to make it easier for more schools to offer arts subjects like music.<\/p>\n

There has been some improvement in recruiting new music teachers this year, but the levels still fall 35% short of government’s target for trainee music teachers in the most recent stats, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n

James Manwaring, president of the Music Teachers Association – which represents music teachers across both state and private schools – says every school should have a choir.<\/p>\n

“All you need is a room and you need someone to lead it and you need students,” says James, who is also the director of music at Windsor Learning Partnership – a multi-academy trust of six state schools.<\/p>\n

“It’s a shame to think some state schools aren’t capitalising on that.”<\/p>\n

He says changes to the school curriculum in England are “very exciting” for boosting music in schools, but says more funding and resources will be needed – “as well as retaining the wonderful music teachers we have out there”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There has been a 25% drop in pupils studying GCSE music at schools in England over the last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329072,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-329071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}