I have spent much of my last 18 months getting to grips with the state of music education in our country, initially as research for a South Bank Show on the subject ‘Musical Nation’ but since then purely because that research instilled in me an enthusiasm for what excellent things are being achieved and what amazing things might be achieved if we were able to spread the best experiences available to some young people to all of them. I feel like a newly converted religious zealot and my road-to- Damascus fervour seems to have coincided with the emergence of various exciting national developments in the field – for example the Music Manifesto, Wider Opportunities and the increasingly confident and numerous Youth Music Action Zones.

I made a film of young musicians’ views on music (and its future) for the Music Manifesto, Tell Tchaikovsky the News. Several overarching themes and impressions came out of these vox pops.

It is easy to forget that the norm of a young person’s life in 21st-century Britain is diversity.  Diversity of experience, of musical taste, of background and of cultural expectation. This is a given amongst the young but it is easy for those of us who grew up in a more homogeneous Anglo-Saxon society in the 1960s or 1970s (or earlier) to forget that what we lived through seems to the young alien and weird. When I was at school, learning music meant European classical art music. Children learnt western orchestral instruments, were dissuaded if at all possible from having an active (ie, corrupting)  interest in popular music and the O- and A-level music syllabus was rigorously limited to that tradition. Class music was often loathed by the majority of children and its public exams were sat by a miniscule number of 16- and 18-yearolds.  To a 16-year-old nowadays, that musical monotheism is completely at odds with their understanding and enjoyment of music.

It’s important to emphasise this, since the crossing of musical frontiers when alluded to  by adult, professional musicians usually has the patronizing assumption at its heart that a child might ‘begin’ their musical journey on an African drum and be led along an increasingly ‘sophisticated’ route to the glories and complexities of European art music. How often do we hear of a journey in the opposite direction being brought to the public’s attention or admired? How many classical music commentators, teachers or pedagogues have diverted their analytical skills to hip-hop? How many orchestral musicians have  taken time to explore the repertoire of their children’s CD or iPod collections?

So often the measure of a child’s aptitude for, or grasp of, music is connected with the mastering of facts.  But musical facts are misleading indicators at the best of times. There are world-class performers who could reduce an audience of 2,000 to tears with the sensitivity and artistry of their musicianship but who themselves would not know Bach’s dates or what a Gesamtkunstwerk is.

The use of facts as a musical litmus test more often than not simply reveals prejudices in the questioner. In 2002, Classic FM commissioned a survey of 600 six- to 14-year-olds to find out how much youngsters ‘knew’ about music. The results caused outrage and dismay amongst the classical music elite, seeming to ‘prove’ conclusively what many of them had been claiming for a while: that modern young Britons are irredeemably lost to the classical tradition – ignorant, brain-dead philistines, bred on mindless pop, pap and musical junk – and that ‘modern’ education would be to blame for this state of affairs.

Articles began appearing in newspapers and magazines. Their authors managed to leave out of their articles the positive aspects of the report, for example that about 40 per cent of the children polled were learning a musical instrument and intended to continue doing so, a percentage that would, I estimate, be bettered only in Germany or perhaps South Korea of all the countries in the world.

What really enraged them was the fact that only 33 per cent of the children could name a classical composer. It’s worth pausing for a moment and examining this apparently ‘catastrophic’ finding. First, remember that the children surveyed were aged six to 14.  How many six-year-olds do you know who can name, on demand, a famous philosopher, writer, poet, architect, scientist, mathematician, painter, sculptor, statesman or even a sportsman or woman from before, say, 1980? Is the fact that they can’t immediately summon up these names an indication that they are stupid or that education has failed them? The kind of information that a child of six or 10 or 14 needs to know today compared with their counterpart in 1970 or 1920 has changed beyond recognition because the world has changed beyond recognition. You might ask a random sample of 600 adults to name a famous nurse of the Crimean War. Let’s be generous and say that 90 per cent of them can remember the name of Florence Nightingale. What exactly do they know about Florence Nightingale? Something about a lamp, perhaps, or some dim memory connected with disinfectants? That’s about it, I think you’ll find. But ask 600 school children that same question today and a majority will probably answer Mary Seacole. Knowing Mary Seacole’s name means having to know why she is significant and what she did: the children’s answer is in fact much more sophisticated and knowledgeable than the adults’ answer and it is also information that has come to light despite nearly two centuries of quite deliberate suppression.

The same 600 children were asked to name a classical music performer and a very different response came back. 98 per cent of them correctly named a living classical performer. What does that tell us? It tells us that for young people music, like everything else in their lives, exists in the here and now; it is a living, performed tradition – not a dusty portfolio of information (however fascinating that information might be to crusty old coves like me).

One reason why folk music is so effective as a tool of musical engagement with the young is because it appears to be spontaneous. The fiddler launches into an instantly lively piece without faffing about with the music stand, the score and a preamble about the Renaissance or the Esterhazys. Of course there may have been a great deal of preparation involved in the performance but it seems to be instantaneous in a way that classical music with its need for detailed notation is not. It is notoriously difficult to ‘date’ a piece of folk music or geographically place it, for that matter – so young people are not expected to ‘know’ anything about the piece’s context in order to enjoy it. Much can be learned from the way folk musicians learn music from memory rather than through slavish obedience to the written score.

Another challenge the 600 children in Classic FM’s market research were set was to identify from a small photograph various classical instruments (note, by the way, that if you could correctly identify 20 Indian classical instruments you would have scored precisely zero in this ‘music’ test). Almost 80 per cent (79!) quickly identified the trumpet but the result that shocked the classical world was that only 77 per cent of these children correctly named a violin. The rest mostly confused it with an equally small  picture of a Spanish guitar. What morons, what empty-headed dunces – to confuse one wooden instrument whose strings stretched over a hollow soundboard with tuning pegs at one end with another wooden instrument whose strings stretched over a hollow soundboard with tuning pegs at one end! What musically illiterate children!

To have deduced from this survey that classical music amongst the young is dead and buried, is, I believe, to betray one’s own prejudices. It told us nothing about young people and musicmaking of whatever style. Alongside wanting and expecting a musical diversity to match the diversity of their friendships, their fashions, their tastes, their experience of  the internet and their appetite for long-distance travel, young people are firm that they want music to be a normal activity not a freakish one. For too long being ‘good at music’ has meant withdrawing a child from regular class lessons for their private lesson, thereby emphasizing their difference from everyone else.  This is a particular issue for boys, whose every instinct before adulthood (and beyond for many) is to ‘fit in’ to the group, to be part of the gang, the crowd, the tribe or the team. Look at boys’ dress sense as  adolescents. They want to wear the same as everyone else. For girls, the same years are taken up with finding those details and accessories that make their clothing slightly different from everyone else. Uniformity, the tribe and the team become less alluring as they mature, especially at special occasions, whereas boys will still gladly be wearing identical DJs to every other man in the room for the rest of their lives.

One of the many encouraging signs coming out of the Wider Opportunities programmes (or a Yamaha Music School session) is that because whole classes are taught instruments or sing together, boys get involved and become motivated in exactly the same numbers as girls. If they can do it as a team, they are much more likely to participate in and enjoy music than if they are forced to go solo.

We should not be frightened of teaching whole classes to sing or to play but no-one  should pretend it is easy. A priority in our efforts must be the support of existing teachers, to make them feel confident at leading group music, which means having the class teachers join in at the same time as their students, being taught to lead by animateurs, professional and community musicians or Advanced Skills Teachers (ASTs).

There are so many reasons why we might want the current generation of school-age children to engage in more and better music: to boost their selfesteem; to give them an ability to perform (in any context); to accelerate their numeracy and literacy skills; to give them activities they can share across the age ranges; to motivate them; to give their feelings an outlet for expression; to enhance their communication skills; to give them a ready-made social group; to let them work as a team without aggression and humiliation; to be able to attain levels of excellence and expertise collectively that  would be beyond them individually – and many other attributes besides.

There is another pressing issue here that lurks behind all we do in music for young people. Society as a whole is deeply anxious, understandably so, about the behaviour of young people, about school discipline, about an apparently rising level of casual abuse and aggressiveness. Whilst it is true that one teenager’s drunken brawl makes the news but another’s outstanding performance at the Schools’ Proms does not, it is an issue no-one who lives in modern Britain can pretend not to contemplate.

Costly efforts by government to reduce truancy have not been especially effective but we know that a good music project either inside our outside the school community can motivate and involve difficult teenagers like nothing else. Music is one area of life that all young people relate to well. It is a sleeping giant in terms of its potential to engage with the disaffected.

The leading broadcaster and criminologist Roger Graef, having witnessed many music workshops with young offenders, described music as the ‘great secret’ that could totally rewrite the book on what to do with society’s most intractable problems. A few months ago, at a secondary school in a very tough area of the northeast, the Sage Gateshead’s Learning & Participation team were running a music project.  During it, the school’s CCTV caught footage of some habitually truanting students breaching the perimeter fence after the start of school hours – not to escape but to get into the school, desperate not to miss the music session arranged for that morning. If any other initiative or activity can boast that kind of success with persistent truants, I would be amazed.

We have been, as a sector, pottering along doing our very best, delivering music education in various shapes and sizes, in some places adequately, in others brilliantly. Going into many school music departments over the past year has reminded me that they are often like families, with some exhausted adult or adults at its core, cajoling, enthusing or motivating with patience, warmth and commitment. The way teachers felt about their students was one of the most remarkable and uplifting aspects of my travels around schools, since there has been a sea-change in the kind of relationships that were the norm between teacher and taught when I was at school 30 years ago. To say that the teachers cared about their pupils is a huge understatement. To all intents and purposes it is a form of unconditional love. It has been a privilege and an eyeopener to be able to watch successful music departments at work and the multiple rewards that these children are reaping from their involvement with music need to be more widely understood and appreciated.

So are we ready for a much bigger challenge? To reach out from beyond our traditional constituency – those musical ‘families’ that inhabit school music departments across the country, or Youth Music Action Zones, or County Youth ensembles – to the young population at large, to the hundreds of thousands of young people whose lives could be transformed radically by their engagement with music and, through it, the rest of our communities, in a positive and meaningful way?

The music industry as a whole has begun to focus on music education with a vengeance – not, I suggest, because they cynically smell profits over a distant hill but because there is a win-win situation here: young people whose lives are enriched by music turn into empowered, creative, participating adults. All society benefits. Yamaha, Roland, EMI, Korg and Sibelius lead the way in terms of scale but many other industry partners have seen what exciting potential there is in music education.

Ministers are ‘switched on’ to what we are achieving and what we could potentially achieve as never before. At a BBC Prom on 30 July last year, young musicians from across the UK performed a piece, Between the Lines, they had devised working alongside professional musicians as part of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s outreach programme. When the youth performance finished, the two government ministers invited to the concert on behalf of the Music Manifesto in our box were on their feet stamping and hollering (as were the other 5,000 people there). Indeed, the Manifesto – by gathering together all the hundreds of agencies, organisations, music companies, charities, institutions and initiatives both formal and voluntary that are involved with young people’s music – is able to put our case with greater force and clarity than has ever been the case.

All of us who are working in this area have noticed renewed vigour and determination to widen the scope and the breadth of what we do, to open up music-making to hundreds of thousands more young people so that when they become parents it is a habit they pass on instinctively to their own children. We have the potential to be one of the most musical nations on earth: why would we not respond to such a magnificent challenge?