Extract
This paper is based on a five-year research project into the work of music teachers in Northern Ireland. It is concerned with the implications of the research for the curriculum. The results reveal a serious shortage of suitably qualified music teachers in the Province, and significant deficiencies in funding and facilities for the subject. They also reveal that many teachers doubt the value of their general classroom teaching, and prefer their extra-curricular activities. The author suggests that Music should become an option during Key Stage Three which schools would have to provide, and which motivated pupils could choose as an alternative to the other `Creative and Expressive' subjects.
The background to the research
The classroom music teachers of Northern Ireland have been the subject of a recent research project which lasted a total of five years (Drummond, 1997). From the outset the focus of the research was the music teacher rather than the music curriculum. This emphasis was intentional. Much has been written in recent years about the latter, while the views of the former would appear to have been ignored. In fact, a search of the British Education Index (1993) failed to find any articles at all on the subject of music teachers. The research was, therefore, intended to fill an important gap in our knowledge of the current educational scene.
While the results of the research did reveal a clear picture of the life and work of classroom music teachers they were nevertheless to have profound implications for the provision of music in the curriculum, and in particular at Key Stage Three (KS3). It is upon these implications that this article will concentrate, rather than the individual results themselves, however interesting.
It is, perhaps, inevitable that a study of teachers should have such implications since the role of the teacher is now the delivery of the curriculum. The implications are of added value in this case, however, since an impression persists that the opinions of teachers were not adequately sought or valued in the original design and formulation of the curriculum in Northern Ireland.
It is certainly true that only one in five members of the Music Working Group which devised the original `Proposals for Music in the Northern Ireland Curriculum' for the Northern Ireland Curriculum Council (NICC, 1991) was a serving teacher working in post-primary education. Moreover, while the `Consultation Report' of this Working Group (NICC, 1992) could claim `widespread support' for its proposals (p. 2), it is by no means certain that this support was, in fact, from the teachers of the Province. Only 28 per cent of post-primary schools bothered to reply and it is unclear whether these replies were from the music teachers themselves, or from heads or boards of governors.
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