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.