Neil O'Brien

The hon. Gentleman has taken the opportunity to put on the record an important point of clarification. I understand that the Leader of the House is looking at modernising the terms that we use in this place—the word “Bill” will be scrapped, perhaps—so the next time we come to this Chamber, it may no longer be a Westminster Hall debate, but a sound system clash or some equivalent that has been modernised. To create a sense of balance, I will say various things about what the last Government did on music education. I will not say that everything in the world was brilliant—obviously it was not—but, for the sake of balance, let us hear some of the things we did. We introduced the music education hubs, which hon. Members have mentioned. They did a mix of providing musical education directly and helping schools. There are, I think, 43 in England today, and we put in £79 million over the past three years towards that programme and another £25 million for the direct capital funding of musical instruments for kids. We brought in the first ever national plan for music education, a key goal of which was to give every child the chance to learn a musical instrument. By 2018, a record number of children were learning instruments. That plan also set out goals to have high-quality music education and more partnerships between schools and others, and to try to reverse the decline in the amount of time spent on music in schools, which I will come back to in a moment. I will not make lots of political points today, but I note that the current Government have pulled the funding for the national youth music organisations. I think it was in February that the national youth music organisations announced that the Government would not be renewing their contribution of £0.5 million towards their work. That is one thing that perhaps takes us in the wrong direction. A question I want to ask the Minister early on in my remarks is about something where there is quite a lot of uncertainty for parents. The Government announced that they would top up the music and dance scheme bursaries for musically gifted young people, so that the effect of the VAT increase on independent schools was counteracted, and they said that that would mean that things would remain unchanged for the rest of the 2024-25 academic year. I want to ask the Minister what will happen for future academic years, which are of course now looming. We have only two weeks left of school, certainly in Leicestershire; it may be three in the rest of the country. The next academic year is looming, and I am keen to understand from the Minister whether that decision will stand for all future academic years and in particular for the one coming up. We have talked a bit about the various changes and trends in music education. It has not been one thing over the last 14 years; there have been different phases. There definitely was a squeeze on music in the coalition period, in the years from 2010 to 2015, but there has been a recovery since, which has not necessarily come out in the debate so far. If we look at the number of hours of music taught across all years, we see that that has gone up from about 80,000 hours a year in 2017-18 to about 86,000 now, so the total amount of music education has been going up since that low point in 2017. This is all aligned with some of the things that were happening to funding over that period. Very difficult decisions on funding were being made in the light of inheriting, in 2010, the largest structural deficit in our entire peacetime history. That was not something we wanted to inherit, but over time we moved towards more generous settlements for schools. In the last Parliament, for example, there was an 11% real-terms funding increase per pupil, and that benefited lots of different things, including music. We have talked about the loss of music teachers, but the number of music teachers has followed a similar, U-shaped trajectory. We have 1,000 more music teachers than we did in 2017-18. The number went from about 6,500 up to 7,500 by 2024. It is worth bringing out some of the nuances in this debate. Also, in a lot of debates about this subject—I have read previous debates on it—we hear people talking about GCSE entries, but as the Government’s own curriculum and assessment review points out, we have to also look at the other qualifications. Although GCSEs have gone down, technical music qualifications that are not GCSE qualifications have been going up, so it is worth having the full and rounded picture. Speaking of full and rounded pictures, the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire also talked about the nature of education debates and the way we often have different priorities being advanced. As someone who has followed education for a long time, I am very conscious that there are constant calls for x to be put on the national curriculum or for schools to do more y. Of course, our poor old teachers, our hard-working teachers, have only so many hours in their day. They are already working hard and there are inevitable trade-offs. The hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire said—I agreed with 90% of his speech—that these things are not in tension with one another. To some extent, they are. There are only a certain number of hours in the school day or in a child’s day, and we do need to make choices. I do not always say this, but one very sensible thing that the Government did was to commission some polling, as part of the curriculum review, about what parents and young people themselves want to see more of in school. The results are really interesting. The survey was of kids who did their GCSEs last year and their parents, and they were asked, “What would you like to have spent more time on in school?” In response, 35% say employment and interview skills, 27% say academic subjects, like maths, history and science, 26% say digital skills and computing, 26% say creative thinking and problem solving, 22% say sports, 22% say communication, like debating and public speaking, 19% say technical subjects, 18% say volunteering and outdoor pursuits and 15% say cultural activities like music, drama and media. I mention that not to say that music is not important—obviously it is; the whole point of this debate is that it is hugely important—but merely to sympathise slightly with Ministers for once, because a lot of different people want more of different things in the school day and there are tensions and choices for them. In that same poll, only about 1% of parents said that their kids were not doing arts subjects because they were not available at their school. There was more of an issue with technical and vocational subjects. One of the things that I am proud of about our time in government is that we prioritised gateway subjects, which has had positive effects. For example, having fallen from 83% to a low of 70% between 2006 and 2011, the share of pupils who take double or triple science has now increased to 98%, and the share of children doing triple science increased from 6%, to 27% in 2019. There was a real turnaround in science, and the same is true in other areas. One of the reasons that English schoolchildren have become the highest achieving in the western world in reading and maths, in studies such as the trends in international mathematics and science study and the programme for international student assessment, while Scotland and Wales have gone backwards, is that we have focused on the important core academic disciplines. None of that is an argument against music or doing more in music; it is simply that there are choices for us. If people say that they want more of the school day devoted to something, they should be clear about what they do not want. I am a bit sceptical about messing around too much with long-running accountability and progress measures such as Attainment 8 and Progress 8. Of course, a student’s results in GCSE music can already be put into those measures if it is one of their eight best subjects. There is discretion: three of the eight have to be from the broad range of subjects in the EBacc, but three do not, so there is already huge school choice in the measure. I am very sceptical about using it as the way to solve our problems. I will end by introducing a thought that has not been much discussed in previous debates on music education. I will not relitigate the debates we have had with the Government about phones in schools, and I do not think that this is something we will disagree on, but we need to think about the way that young people are spending their time, including out of school. I am alarmed by the changes in the way that young people are spending their time: the increase in the amount of time they are spending alone and on social media and the incredible number of kids who, when you ask them, “What are you doing this evening?”, say, “I’ll be scrolling TikTok.” That is incredibly depressing, and we can see that it is having negative real-world consequences. It is leading to worse mental health among young people and worse real-world consequences in, for example, A&E admissions. It is eating up the time for other things that, when we are much older, we wish we had spent more time on. I wish that I had spent more time learning the guitar and less time faffing around on the ZX Spectrum, that time thief of the 1980s, but young people today have it much worse because of social media. They feel compelled to be on it because of social pressure and because it is designed by geniuses to be incredibly addictive, and it is eating up their time. One thing we may find a consensus on over time is the need to do something about that and to change the balance of young people’s lives and the amount of time they spend on social media, often on platforms that they are not supposed to be on but that happily welcome young people, who they can monetise—in violation of their own terms and conditions, by the way. I fear that I am veering away from the subject, but this is an important part of the conversation. Here is a very large part of the time of young people, who are at the time of their lives when they have the opportunity and the mental sponginess to learn something new—and could, unlike me, make a success of a career in rock and roll—yet it is being swallowed up by things that in future they will not think were a good use of their time. I again congratulate the hon. Member for Southgate and Wood Green on securing this very important debate, which I welcome. There is a lot more we can do. I hope that the Minister will cover the point about the special bursaries scheme.