THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM AND STRATEGIC ADVOCACY FOR MUSIC AND THE

ARTS
Richard Letts, Music Council of Australia
September 10, 2009

There is controversy among some in the music community about the appropriate advocacy
objectives for music education, in the context of the formulation of and follow-on from the
National Curriculum in the arts.
One position says that music is the most valuable of the arts and that our sole objective
should be continuous universal school music education for Australian children regardless of
competing interests from other art forms, practicalities for governments, the Australian
Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) or other such considerations.
The other position agrees with the objective of universal provision of continuous school
music education but says that if it is promoted blindly and regardless of circumstances and
competing interests, there may be such dispute and disruption that governments step back
and the opportunity for progress is lost.
This paper supports and explains the second position. It goes through the history, considers
various issues and shows how the strategic position was arrived at. This particular
controversy is something of a digression from the real issue, which is as always about
resourcing: adequate training of teachers, provision of teaching time, facilities and
equipment.

GETTING THE ARTS INCLUDED IN THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

1. In the announcement by the Federal government of the establishment of a national
curriculum, the list of subjects omitted the arts.
2. Advice came from high in the bureaucracy that it was essential that the arts seek
inclusion because on that would depend the potential for Commonwealth provision of
resources for arts education and the knock-on effects for the states.
3. MCA, independently and as a member of and through Education Minister Gillard’s Music
Education Advisory Group, agitated for inclusion of the arts. Among other actions, it met
with Peter Garrett and with Julia Gillard’s relevant staff officer.
4. The National Advocates for Arts Education (NAAE) was reconstituted under a slightly
changed name but not acronym. It had fought the previous exclusion of the arts from
the Key Learning Areas defined by the Commonwealth in an exercise in the early 1990s.
It achieved inclusion of the arts. The agenda now was basically the same.
5. NAAE is comprised of nine associations for five artforms taught in present curricula:
dance, drama, music, visual arts/design, and media. All five are officially included in the
curricula of all states and territories excepting NSW, which excludes media.
6. The members of NAAE are, for music:
Australian Society for Music Education: Jay McPherson
Music Council of Australia: Richard Letts
-- and for the other artforms:
Art Education Australia: Marian Strong
Ausdance: Julie Dyson, Jeff Meiners
Australian Teachers of Media: Roger Dunscombe, Derek Weeks
 Drama Australia: Sandra Gattenhof, Mark Bailey
National Association of Visual Arts: Tamara Winikoff
7. NAAE campaigned vigorously, directly to politicians, bureaucrats and the (then) National
Curriculum Board (now the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority,
ACARA). It also recruited other organisations such as CHASS to intervene. We have had
feedback that this concerted voice from the artforms plus allies was very effective and
possibly crucial.
8. Please note: this is extremely important. One of my earliest experiences in advocacy
was hearing a federal minister dismiss the arts as “a rabble”, all fighting each other
around their own narrow interests. Why should he choose one side, only to be assaulted
by the other? He would be on a public hiding to nothing, for something (the arts) that
was not important politically.
9. Peter Garrett, supported by this concurrent activity from NAAE, made a presentation to
the state education ministers at a MCEETYA meeting and there was a decision to include
the arts in the national curriculum. Hooray.
10. However, as can be amply demonstrated around our educational jurisdictions, having a
curriculum is one thing, providing resources to teach it is altogether another. For this
reason, the “Melbourne Declaration” is important.
11. The “Melbourne Declaration” was promulgated by all Australian education ministers after
a meeting of MCEETYA in December 2008. It listed the arts as subjects that should be
offered in all Australian curricula. It classified the arts as Performing Arts (dance, drama,
music) and Visual Arts (visual art and design, media) and says that all students should
receive an education in the performing and visual arts. This statement is extremely
important because it is a formal commitment to arts education by the education
ministers at a time when the arts had not been included in the National Curriculum and
had been intentionally omitted as core subjects in a manifesto issued by the Australian
Primary Principals Association.

IN WHAT FORM SHOULD THE ARTS BE INCLUDED?

12. The NAAE success in the 1990s led inadvertently to a horror: the establishment of a
subject called the “creative arts”. In a curriculum in which the arts had to compete with a
crowd of other subjects, they also now had to compete with each other. The outcome
was that they were merged into this single subject which became the arts offering in
many university preservice courses for primary school classroom teachers and
consequently in many primary school classrooms. Sometimes music is treated as an
individual component of these courses, sometimes it is integrated with other artforms. In
all cases, the compulsory music training is seriously inadequate, as MCA’s new study of
this area verifies (see below).
13. The NAAE has agreed that in the new national curriculum, each of the five artforms will
be treated individually according to its own nature. It emphatically rejects the concept of
rolling all artforms into a single subject excepting that it sees the advantage of some
integration of the separate art forms in the very early years. ACARA seems to have
accepted this proposition. (ACARA now needs to be resourced to construct five more
curricula where initially it thought it was adding only one.)
14. Every NAAE member wants every child to have continuous, sequential, developmental
education in its respective artform. But it is inconceivable that in a situation in which
77% of government schools – and an even higher percentage of primary schools—do
not offer a competent music education, nor probably a competent education in the other
artforms, they will be transformed into offering a full education to all children in all five.
It may simply be infeasible.
15. Music could insist that it should be offered in every school, but do we think that the
other artforms would simply say “Yes, of course, your claims are superior to ours. What
could we have been thinking of?”.
16. ACARA has asked how schools will be able to handle five artforms. ACARA director Rob
Randall: "Show us how this (the arts curriculum) will work and articulate NAAE's desired
position clearly e.g. access to all five areas? Each year? All the time? Every child?" (April
6) Inescapable questions. ACARA's Curriculum Design process states that K-10
achievement standards will be represented at every year of schooling by: a statement of
the learning typically expected, a set of grade descriptors, a set of work samples that will
illustrate typical learning.
17. While ACARA certainly can write curricula for the five separate artforms, it will have to
decide on practicable objectives in each case and if all five must be offered year-round
by every school, those objectives probably would have to be very modest.
18. In order to address ACARA’s questions and to continue to present the united front for
the arts that had been so successful to date, NAAE needed to agree on a more detailed
position. Taking into account such issues as those above, it has developed this concept:
during the years of compulsory schooling, generally K-10, all schools will have
curriculum content for every artform and will have to meet achievement standards in at
least two of the five artforms, one from the performing arts, one from the visual arts.
The achievement standards for the chosen subjects will require provision of continuous,
sequential developmental education. In the other subjects, schools should offer rich but
not necessarily continuous experiences. At secondary level senior years, NAAE would
recommend that all artforms should be offered as full electives.
19. The proposal that one subject should come from performing, one from visual arts was
conceived to be in accord with the agreement of the Ministers in the Melbourne
Declaration and so offer a path of least resistance. It disadvantages the performing arts
statistically and I have subsequently proposed to NAAE that schools should simply
choose among all five artforms as they wish. This also gives greater freedom for
pairings. This proposal has not been warmly received, because it departs from the
Melbourne Declaration and because the current position was achieved only after a lot of
discussion.
20. It is conceivable that if adequately resourced, secondary schools could offer a full
curriculum in all five art forms because generally they are larger than primary schools
and they are staffed by subject specialists.
21. At primary school level, where schools are smaller and (except in Queensland) the arts
are taught by generalist classroom teachers, each school would choose the artforms in
which it offers sequential year-round learning. It would then have to find staff that are
capable of delivering those curricula. As one of the APPA Board describes it, there would
have to be a “whole-of-school” solution. This would be difficult enough if a school offers
one artform subject. Each additional artform adds more complexity and requires more
skills from classroom teachers.
22. The issue of teacher skills is addressed below.
23. The schools, having chosen their artforms, would publicise them and parents could
choose according to the child’s interests and talents. Perhaps in larger population
centres, schools could be organised into clusters so that all the various permutations and
combinations are available within a fairly small geographical area.
24. If such a model were adopted, music could campaign to enlist as many schools as
possible, and even state governments, to the music curriculum. We have plenty of
arguments. I think there has been more research on the array of benefits of a music
education than for any other artform and although I know of no study that has compared
the benefits delivered by the various artforms, I suspect music would show the strongest
results. There is evidence showing the effects of a music education on brain development
 (e.g. Gazzaniga in Music Forum 14/4, describing research outcomes which he
characterises as very promising though not yet conclusive).
25. And we can make the claim that for many reasons, a performance-based music
curriculum music requires a continuous, sequential program as no other artform does,
perhaps even dance. It is relevant to this argument that virtually all of the research
projects showing the benefits of a music education to outcomes in academic, social and
other areas are based on student participation in performance programs. The Classical
Music Consumer Segmentation Study conducted by the Knight Foundation with 25,000
individuals in the USA found that it is the people with early experiences in music making
rather than exposure to music who are the ticket buyers in later life.
26. It should be acknowledged that music is not the artform of choice for all children. Some
have other passions and talents. We are making decisions for the children, not for us.
27. The two-subject proposal has run into criticism from some in the music sector who see it
as abandoning the aspiration that all school children should be offered an education in
music.
28. Let me be clear on this. No organisation has put more effort into building a public
consensus on the value of music education and the provision of universal continuous,
sequential development music education throughout the school years than has MCA. It
has spent vast personal energies and funds approaching $2 million towards this objective
through a variety of strategies. We are pretty sure that at this point public attitudes are
shifting and public interest is growing. Why would MCA suddenly abandon this
aspiration? But there is a need to act strategically and with integrity. Do we have the
best solution? Well, not if a better one comes along. It didn’t happen yet but perhaps it’s
possible.
29. Another criticism heard from a couple of people is that it is too early to have made this
“compromise”. Well, it has provided the ground on which the artforms continue to
cooperate. It cannot be too early for that. But let us ask the question: What is the nature
of the deal that could be done if we had waited? How would it be better?

A NOTE ON APPA
30. The recent manifesto issued by the Australian Primary Principals Association proposed a
core curriculum of four subjects. The purpose was to focus the curriculum by getting rid
of a clutter of subjects that overburdened the schools. The arts were omitted.
31. Approaches were made to APPA by various parties to ask it to include music or the arts.
APPA conceded that the arts are important but did not agree to include them in the list of
core subjects.
32. This month, NAAE met by phone with members of the APPA curriculum committee and
suggested the minimum two-subjects arts scenario. The proposal was warmly received
and characterised as ‘realistic’ and ‘common-sense’. While no public statement has yet
been made by APPA, we have the impression that ground has been gained.

THE REAL ISSUE: LACK OF RESOURCES

33. Agreement on the National Curriculum does not of itself solve the main problem, its
delivery by skilled teachers in school time with adequate facilities and equipment. Data
extrapolated by Ian Harvey from the Stevens Report, the MCA’s study of the provision of
music education in schools, indicate that only 23% of public schools offer a competently
delivered music education, most of them secondary schools. We are a long way from
success.
34. The obstacle to provision of an effective music education in schools is not the lack of a
curriculum. Effective music teaching takes place in many Australian schools now. By
 some means or another, curricula and curricular materials are available for teaching of
music in any circumstances.
35. The real issue is the provision of resources: salaries for teachers, physical facilities,
equipment, classroom time – and teacher skills. The completion of the national
curriculum will lead directly into recognition of the need for resources to implement it.
For literacy and numeracy, we could assume that this would mean redirection of existing
resources. For music and the arts, it means the addition of resources. Key to these is the
provision of competent teaching.
36. A study by the MCA, now in its final draft, shows that nationally the compulsory music
instruction given to aspiring primary school classroom teachers in their preservice
undergraduate courses ranges between zero and 52 hours, for an average of 17 hours
over a four year course. That is to say, 17 hours out of a total of about 1500 hours!1
37. It gets worse than that. Increasingly, teaching credentials are achieved through a post-
graduate diploma or degree, in which case the music instruction is about half the
average for undergraduates. On the basis of this preparation, the teachers are supposed
to be competent to deliver a music curriculum through any and all of the seven primary
school years K-6, or in some states eight years K-7. This is a risible proposition.
38. There are arguments for delivery of music education by classroom teachers. For
instance, if they are musically skilled, they can find ways to include music as an element
in other subjects, assisting learning in those subjects, enlivening the classroom and as
well, consolidating musical skills.
39. But when all is said and done, probably the main reason that music teaching is the
responsibility of generalists is because the other solution is more expensive.
40. What compulsory preservice music instruction would be needed to ensure that
classroom teachers are adequately prepared to deliver a continuous, sequential
developmental curriculum year-round? More than 17 hours! Perhaps at least a weekly
music class throughout the undergraduate degree course. Two classes per week for
postgraduate courses. At the undergraduate level, this would mean on average,
approximately an eight-fold increase in music instruction. How likely is that?2
41. Furthermore, if the classroom teacher is to be able to deliver not one, but five artforms,
there would be an eight-fold increase in time and resources given to teaching all of the
arts and the teachers would have to be able to absorb these skills along with those in
literacy, numeracy, the sciences, history and so on. How likely or even feasible is that?!
42. It is interesting that recently there were newspaper reports of the dissatisfaction among
the history educators’ representatives that classroom teachers did not have the skills to
teach history properly. Without investigating further, I am guessing that this would be
repeated in other subject areas. Perhaps classroom teachers are really not generalists
but literacy/numeracy specialists. Anyway, there is a big problem here.
43. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that music is unlikely to be competently taught by
generalists except where they bring musical skills acquired elsewhere by accident of birth
or life circumstances. They are, after all, otherwise products of our music-starved
system.
44. The experiment of handing music education to generalists has been given decades to
work and whatever its theoretical merits, it has failed. The prospect of training them to a

1
Some institutions offer additional music instruction as an elective. It is estimated that about 20% of students choose
to take the elective.
2
Since universities offer instruction for two 14-week semesters per year, of which two weeks per semester may be
non-teaching weeks, even weekly music instruction during semester leaves students without classes for nearly half
the year. No serious music student downs tools for half the year. Sequential, developmental, continuous.
 competent level is remote. There must be an intervention by music education
specialists.3
45. A back of the envelope calculation indicates that it would cost about $250 million
nationally to have a music specialist available once a week to every public primary school
classroom.
46. Is that a lot of money? It seems that it is not impracticable, since Queensland, even
pre-mining boom, has employed music specialists for nearly all primary schools. There is
at anecdotal level increasing evidence of the positive outcomes for musical life and
invention in Queensland.

THE SITUATION FOR ADVOCACY

47. At the time around 2003 when Minister for Education under the Howard government,
Brendan Nelson, commissioned the National Review of School Music Education, there was
no problem in treating music as a separate discipline and giving it special treatment.
Shortly afterwards, the visual arts lobby managed to secure a review of visual arts
education in schools. That, apparently, was not a problem either.
48. Nelson accepted the findings of National Review of Music Education and a year later, the
National Music Workshop. In Parliament, the Labor opposition through Shadow Arts
Minister Garrett criticised the lack of action by the government to implement the
recommendations for music education.
49. Now in government, within the Federal Ministry, Arts Minister Peter Garrett has taken
the running on advocacy for arts education. Garrett promised in his election campaign
that all Australian children would receive, not just a music education but an arts
education, beginning with music then the visual arts.
50. When the arts were omitted from plans for the National Curriculum, Arts (not
Education) Minister Peter Garrett developed a proposal to put before the Cultural
Ministers Council and then MCEETYA, the conference of state and federal Ministers for
Education, to write independently a national arts curriculum. The idea was accepted.
Then it was after all included in the work of the National Curriculum Board (now ACARA)
in the second phase of its work.
51. As a result, governments at broad brush-stroke level are now dealing with all five
artforms in the context of the National Curriculum. If you recall, the reason for MCA’s
interest in the National Curriculum was that it is potentially the key to unlocking
Commonwealth resources for the arts with a flow-on to state level. So they deal with
education in all artforms at the curriculum level and, in the future, in issues around
resourcing.
52. This has changed the advocacy picture. All of MCA’s advocacy to this point has been
about universal provision of continuous music education. MCA can continue to make that
position but there are two problems:
a. Governments logically will have to either
i. Reject or ignore MCA’s proposals
ii. Accept them but apply them to all artforms
iii. Accept them and favour music over other artforms and face the heat
from that decision
b. The other artforms are unlikely to accept preferential treatment for music and
so there is a risk of public division and a media circus.

3
In NSW, a specialist teaching degree in music does not make one eligible to teach in a primary school, even if
restricted to teaching music. All primary school teachers must have generalist degrees. Barely credible.
53. However, the response from the other artforms may be problematical only while the
National Curriculum process is underway. There does seem to be agreement that
each can promote its merits as schools make their choices.
54. Concerning governments, we need to remember that we do not begin from a
position of political strength. We all know how poorly music education is resourced
and how ephemeral has been political support. MCA’s advocacy strategy has been to
build public support for the inclusion of music in the curriculum and based on
demonstrable positive public attitudes, persuade politicians to act, fairly secure in the
belief that the public approves and that they will not be clobbered in the media.
55. I think we are making really good progress. I have the impression that the media
coverage of music education issues has increased very substantially over the last few
years. Some coverage has been caused directly by MCA but with some of it we have
had no direct connection. There seems to be a level of spontaneity. Ian Harvey’s
music attitudes survey has shown a quite substantial increase in the percentage of
the population that has heard of the arguments around the benefits of music
education – somewhere over a third, from memory. Given that the press just told us
that half the population is functionally illiterate, that is a high number.
56. But it’s fragile. Arts education is probably not a central issue in most people’s lives
and on the evidence is of little priority to politicians. To have it become publicly
controversial due to wrangling in the arts or music sector could be disastrous.
57. We need to act intelligently and strategically to secure the necessary government
resources to take us forward, even though we don’t get everything we want, on the
table, tomorrow.
58. Discourse on these issues will take place in various contexts: within NAAE, within the
MCA, within ACARA and its reference groups. Hopefully, we can all keep our minds
open and reach agreement on the best possible outcome for the professions and
above all, for the children.