Pay for Instrumental Teachers

The livelihood of some instrumental teachers is now being threatened, owing both to the pressure on their rates of pay and purchasing power, and the number of teaching hours dwindling due to lack of demand. Over the last 40 years, circumstances at an international, national and local level have combined to create this situation. Equally, new mentalities shaping the terms of instrumental provision have re-shaped the environment in which teachers work in a way that has obstructed the efficient delivery of music education. As a result, the predictions educationalists made in the 1960s, that music education (like education more generally) would be vital in capitalizing on the growing leisure time we would enjoy as a result of future technological and productivity gains, now seem glib. But the fate of instrumental teachers and their work is not predetermined. A thoroughgoing rationalisation of instrumental teaching provision, one that puts teachers at the helm for the benefit of students, inside a clearly-defined contractual framework, provides one hope – perhaps the last and only hope – for the profession.

Circumstances in the last 40 years have sporadically militated against the status of instrumental teaching as an important part of education more generally. Looking forward from the 1960s in which they worked, educationalists once predicted that the workforce would enjoy growing amounts of leisure time as improvements in technology gave way to gains in productivity and the burden of work on each of us accordingly declined. Music education might reasonably stand to benefit as students would learn instruments to garner up hobbies to fill these expanding periods of leisure. The instrumental teacher seemed to have a part to play in a bright future.

The period since then has, by contrast, witnessed a gradual erosion of the status of instrumental teaching and the ability to prosper financially. Following the oil price shock of 1973, economic stringencies began to put pressure on educational budgets for the provision of music education. Whereas in the infamous Winter of Discontent a peripatetic instrumental teacher might have petrol vouchers and be classified as an essential car-user, as the 1970s wore on the instrumental teacher became an auxiliary worker, no longer meeting essential needs of the students. A new insistence on core subjects and the limit on budgets pushed instrumental teaching toward the side lines. Push turned to shove in the Education Reform Act of 1988, when the National Curriculum, consolidated the focus on core subjects and limits in which music formed a statutory requirement; by 2002 students could abandon any music courses once they reached the end of Key State Three at 14 years of age.

The demand for instrumental instruction has likewise suffered in this period. Family budgets have not remained immune from the inflationary trends loosed by the oil price shock. Inflation in the price of consumer products, 25% in 1975, down to under 4% in 1983 but never far from diminishing household incomes in the recession of the early 1990s and now in the wake of the current economic crisis has contributed to the difficulty parents’ face – whether or not to pay for instrumental lessons. Numbers of students undertaking lessons, particularly those wishing to learn a large range of instruments, has waned. In turn, the income of those instrumental teachers affected has declined, and what they can earn rarely keeps pace with the increases in prices of food, petrol and rented accommodation let alone buying a house of their own. A picture of regional variation emerges when looking across the country, as deprived and post-industrial areas haunted by high unemployment and a stagnant local economy witness the collapse of instrumental provision altogether. Meanwhile, The Telegraph newspaper reported in 2009 that £4,350 per household of tax payers’ monies has been redirected to the banking sector in order to shore up Britain’s under-capitalised banks. Education, and music education, remains a more distant concern than ever.

A new mentality now bulks large in the landscape of instrumental teaching as a response to these circumstances. Music services model themselves on corporations, directed by a team of managers in accordance with targets and principles not necessarily derived from the realities faced in the classroom by the instrumental teacher. The coming of the National Curriculum and key stages in learning had already landed instrumental teachers with a series of targets to reach: the burden of proof now fell on them to guide their student to jump through hoops called examinations to demonstrate tangible outcomes of teaching. More recently, families involved in learning an instrument have become clients who buy a service with defined ends in mind – usually examination success as with the curriculum. Some services offered also become categorised into groups of students with special needs, talented students, mentally-handicapped students and adult students with learning difficulties in a way that does not necessarily match their capabilities when treated as individuals without labels and in terms of their musical ability. Overseeing this, managers who not always remember their training as musicians and teachers seem to forget any awareness of the stringencies of instrumental teaching. They direct the enterprise rarely even attending an instrumental lesson. The voice of the instrumental teacher in determining how best to meet students’ needs, how to teach students and how to direct the best use of their talents has become drowned out in this mass of managerial concerns with commercial consideration and client-led service.

Reform of music services, most recently into hubs, and the commercial necessities of having extensive management and public relations capacities in music services further diverts resources away from teaching provision and pushes up the costs to parents of lessons. Private providers have been quick to exploit this flabbiness by colonizing what they see as a gap in the market for instrumental teaching. Agencies or co-operatives offering employed or self-employed status to teachers on lower hourly rates have multiplied in recent years without regulation of the quality of the tuition they provide. Such moves have fed into the decline of national pay bargaining in the public sector, as it becomes difficult to justify public sector pay levels to a hard-pressed public in view of the downward pressure on wages generally.

And, for all their management roles, music services have not had demonstrable success in recruiting students across the range of instrumental teaching available. Besides instruments like the guitar, drums and the flute, music service initiatives to interest young string and wind players have not achieved noticeable results as witnessed in the Wider Opportunities Scheme. Possible factors may be the rise of alternative music since the 1970s and before, and the recent rise of the digital media cultivating a climate of student opinion in favour of ‘instant gratification’, both of which militate against the complexities of classical music. It remains to be seen whether or not creative and subtle recruitment campaigns could attract new cohorts of future musicians in these areas.

Only a thoroughgoing rationalisation of instrumental teaching can restore its status to an important part of education attracting economically-viable numbers of students and supporting the livelihoods of instrumental teachers. A new balance needs to be found between managing and providing music education, with all that entails in general pedagogy and teaching methodology. The purpose of managers as facilitators of instrumental teaching should be placed in its proper perspective. It has little use when it skews and complicates the teacher’s task by imposing targets and outcomes on instrumental teachers. Instrumental teachers’ knowledge of teaching and experience of the classroom should be given greater weight in music service strategy and recruitment of new students. And all teachers and genres of music should gain robust representation both in order to provide comprehensive music education and to preserve aspects of our national heritage that seem poised at the threshold of terminal decline, classical music amongst them. It will not escape colleagues who entered the profession in the 1970s and 1980s that music services then achieved these goals often with only a few managers and secretaries. Could it be so unreasonable to think that this could be achieved today?

Improvement of instrumental provision on these lines will, however, only result from a satisfactory settlement of the contractual and salary terms awarded to teachers empowered to complete their administrative and timetabling work instead of burdensome management and office structures. Many musicians have found, historically, that working in a self-employed capacity allows for a satisfactory combination of freelance orchestral work and private teaching and perhaps other part-time work outside of music. The situation, however, is now changing: musicians are unable to pursue this combination of work as the number of private students decline, less orchestral work is available and alternative, non-music employment opportunities with reasonable pay disappear in the midst of our current recession. With the costs saved through the dramatic reduction of management and office staff, instrumental teachers could reclaim their permanent teacher status whether full or part-time. The hourly rates they charge would then reflect the real costs of instrumental teaching rather than today, when parents are faced with large bills of which only a small percentage finds its way to teachers after the deductions made to meet management and organisational costs of the music service.

Without these additional costs of management and office facilities and its staff, the hourly rate and instrumental teacher salary could look as it does in the table below, ignoring the usual qualified national teachers’ agreement, and assuming the 35-hour week and 10 lessons per term model:

[1] This would include annual holiday pay at 12.07% of the hourly rate.

With fewer managers and office staff, the instrumental teacher may have more non-teaching work to complete as they timetable and recruit students by running orchestral courses and giving concerts; but they would have the security of a regular annual salary and enjoy a varied and more fulfilling career with more interaction with colleagues.

Circumstances and the change in attitudes to instrumental teaching in the last 40 years notwithstanding, the current solutions proffered by market principles, over-management and target-driven, client-led service regimes have not provided a sustainable response to the perils facing instrumental teachers and the invaluable music education they provide. The thoroughgoing rationalisation I am suggesting could prove much more satisfactory in the longer term. But it would require coordinated union and professional action and it would transform the nature of instrumental teaching as well as the livelihood of instrumental teachers for years to come.