Extended Play: Building an Equitable Music-Making Offer in Special Education Schools

Hello! Ben here, UpRising project co-lead. Alongside our lovely new website, we are launching this Research Blog to share some of the behind-the-scenes thinking that is shaping the project.

UpRising began in 2020, working across the East Midlands to improve the quality and consistency of music provision for pupils who are Disabled, neurodivergent and/or have additional learning needs (ALN). Notable achievements between 2020 and 2024 included:

• Delivering training to 900+ teachers & instrumental tutors

• The UpRising Resource Balloon, accessed by thousands of practitioners worldwide

• Curriculum guidance documents for special education settings

• An East-Midlands wide specialist school network and inclusive choir

• The pioneering Great Little Orchestra Project

• 2 music education industry awards

  
  

There has, in my opinion, been a profound change in each of the MEHEM hubs' inclusive offers, a shift in the mindset of hub staff at all levels, and many more minutes of meaningful music-making happening in both mainstream and specialist settings.

Three big challenges remain

The populations of special education schools and enhanced provision settings (I'll refer to them together as 'special education settings', or SES) are incredibly diverse, from those working towards their GCSEs to those who engage with the world primarily on a sensory level, with a cognitive age of 18 months or less. It is therefore not possible to create a ‘model curriculum’ for SES in the same way it is for mainstream. You would need at least three different curriculum pathways, and it isn’t uncommon that pupils from all three pathways to be in the same class.

This diversity also means that when we offer training, we must have a clear idea of the pupils that each practitioner is working with in order to offer ideas and activities that are going to be relevant and useful. But what if they are an instrumental teacher who hasn’t visited the school yet and doesn’t know themselves?

It became clear that out-of-class training and resources – however strong -  weren't enough to address three challenges:

SES classroom teachers often feel underequipped to teach curriculum music lessons

Lots of (probably most) curriculum music teaching in Special Education Settings is done by non-specialist classroom teachers. Most don’t consider themselves ‘musical’ or have an advanced understanding of what constitutes musical learning. Each has their own history of music education, sometimes painful. They can be shy to sing in front of colleagues, worry about the chaos of giving everyone an instrument, and are unsure of where to find appropriate resources. Initial teacher training programmes typically focus on music for one day or less. The result is often either surface-level music lessons, or no music at all.

In 2023 we ran a 5-part webinar series, ‘Musicking for the Terrified’, to try and address this. There were definite success stories, but we were left feeling that in many cases a longer-term, more hands-on approach that responded to each teacher's actual pupils was needed.   

Many hub-based instrumental tutors do not feel equipped to teach the full range of needs found in special education settings (SES)

The range of individuals learning in SES require multiple different pedagogical approaches.  Instrumental teachers must have a toolbox capable of responding to individual need, as well as a broader understanding of what music education can and should be.  This takes time to develop and must combine theoretical input with supported ‘flight hours’ in the classroom. Five of the six MEHEM hubs reported a lack of workforce capacity across their regions.

Music could be especially powerful for some groups, but they need extra support to engage

We three cohorts in SES that have as much – if not more - to gain from consistent music-making opportunities as others, but who require a particularly specialised practitioner skillset and set of progression pathways. These are:

• Pupils with Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities

• Pupils who have ALN and are care experienced

• Pupils who have ALN and have mental ill-health

Colleagues around the country are doing amazing work in these areas (shout out to Lu Bristow and her team at the Bristol Beacon), but working with these groups remains a specialist skill. We need guidance for not-yet-specialised practitioners so we can make sure our collective offer works for many more individuals.

We have a plan

Big challenges to overcome, but we have some ideas. Our experience, as well as sector and academic research, suggests that truly transformative practitioner development needs the following ingredients:

• A longish period of supported time doing the doing: Inclusive practice and music-making are fundamentally responsive and relational, and so practitioners need to develop their craft in sessions through a mixture of observing others and trying things out with another professional in the room who can support and reflect. Over time, this allows them to develop their own approach based on their particular skills and interests. This in turn leads to the ‘mastery moments’ that are so crucial to developing confidence.

  
  

• Co-delivery: Working alongside people with complimentary skill sets. For us, this often means a music specialist working alongside someone who knows the pupils really well, emphasising the value of both.

  
  

• Mentoring & Communities of Practice Transforming practice goes hand in hand with transforming aspects of the self. This is especially true when working with pupils with more profound needs. Communities of practice and more formal mentoring provide a mirror, a microphone, a safety net and a launchpad.

  
  

• Theoretical understanding: Alongside practical experiences, practitioners need to know why something works (or doesn’t) so that they can transfer the underlying principles to other situations. In this case, theories may include the Sounds of Intent model, Intensive Interaction, or principles of Non-Violent Communication.

  
  

• Resources: Flexible, detailed, easily accessible, and (I can’t say it enough) speaking to the huge range of ability and interest found in special education settings.  

None of these are rocket science in and of themselves - many of these ideas are well established in the sector. What we wanted to do, and what I think hasn't been done before, is bring all of these elements together on a large scale and specifically in the context of special education settings.

We have the foundation: a tight-knit UpRising team from across the region, the trust of leaderships in both hubs and schools, and a collective knowledge base of five years of shared training and development. The idea is to closely observe what happened in each of the schools and adjust what we were doing as we went along, sharing learning wherever possible. This approach is known as ‘action-research’: a process of “developing understanding of a situation in order to be able to act intelligently within that situation” (Tomal, 2010). Crucially, it relies on everyone involved sharing their perspectives and ideas for refinements at all stages of the process.

Action Research is a core part of the philosophy of Youth Music, the organisation that funded UpRising between 2020-2023 and has been so fundamental to the development of the inclusive landscape over the last decades. We were deeply chuffed that Youth Music saw the potential value of the project and awarded MEHEM £200k to undertake ‘UpRising360’, a programme of work that will allow us to deliver a programme with the above ingredients in over 40 schools across the East Midlands between 2025-2028. 

The Great Little Orchestra Project can be seen as a micro-version of UpRising360

Research and sector impact

Wow. Amazing. And in the current funding climate, great funding comes with great responsibility. We want to get this right for the East Midlands, and we want to leverage our emerging knowledge and networks to develop and evidence a model that could be useful to colleagues nationally and perhaps even internationally.

So we have designed the project that we feel has the best chance of success, but that also allows us to gather data that gets deep into the nuances of what is going on. We are well aware that each practitioner is on an individual journey and that there are multiple factors that are going to affect what happens, not least the significant challenges that specialist schools are facing in terms of staffing and budgets. It became clear that there needed to be a research element that was baked into the project but also rigorous and with theoretical depth.

So, long story short, I successfully applied to undertake a PhD at the Institute of Education, UCL, funded by the UK Research Institute via the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP). The PhD is supervised by Professor Graham Welch and Dr Austin Griffiths, the former being one of the architects of the Sounds of Intent framework, and both incredible sources of knowledge on all aspects of music education. The title of the PhD is 'An Integrated Approach to Developing Music Educators in Special Education Settings'. It will allow me the space and support to draw out the learnings from the programme to create frameworks and resources that will hopefully allow others to adapt it for their own settings.

The dream is to create a classroom-based development programme for both generalist classroom teachers and instrumental tutors that is streamlined and cheap to implement, allowing schools and hubs across the country to support their staff to offer (even more) profound and high-grade musical opportunities for pupils.

UpRising's strength has always been in drawing on the expertise of colleagues from across the region and beyond. Alongside my own research, the fabulous team from Birmingham City University, Prof Victoria Kinsella and Dr Anthony Anderson, will be leading an evaluation of the wider project. Dr Rosie Rushton from Birmingham University is leading on the PMLD strand of the programme. Look out for contributions from all of three in future posts.  

At the heart of the UpRising from the beginning of the project have been a team of Music Inclusion Specialists from each of the MEHEM hubs - Helen, Gideon, Anna, Saree, Jess, Isaac, Andrew, Claire, Jayne, Emily-May, Vicki - who are visiting schools and providing the vital mentoring and support to developing practitioners. This genuine community of practice, sitting alongside the amazing network of music subject leads in various East Midlands schools, is what allows us to even attempt this ambitious piece of work.

Hopefully I have been able to effectively outline we are trying to change and how. It is ambitious, and I am well aware that there are colleagues with many decades of experience out there whose thoughts would be invaluable on this journey – please do get in touch if you would like to chat, question, challenge us into further improvements.

If you want to get alerts when the blog is updated the best thing to do is join our mailing list.

Thanks for reading!

Ben

References

Tomal, D. R. (2010). Action research for educators. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.