Every Child a Musician: Project Evaluation 2011-2012

In Autumn 2010, the London Borough of Newham began the ‘Every Child a Musician (ECAM)’ service by offering a unique music programme that sought to provide a free musical instrument and two years of free tuition to all Year 5 and Year 6 children in 60+ Newham Primary Schools. Following a pilot year in 2010/2011 in a small number of schools, ECaM was made available to all N=7,723 Year 5 and Year 6 Primary pupils in 2011/2012. As part of the evaluation of the programme, researchers from the International Music Education Research Centre (iMerc) at the Institute of Education, University of London were invited to work with the ECaM team in the collection of impact evidence from various stakeholders across the opening full year. Accordingly, the researchers adopted a multi-methods research methodology in order to ensure that the research data encompassed a wide variety of evidence sources. These approaches included (i) creating a map of the borough’s instrumental provision in terms of pupils’ postcodes in order to understand the nature of any relationship between instrumental provision and children’s underlying social and economic needs; (ii) gathering questionnaire data from N=3,931 pupils (approximately 50% of the available population) on their initial perceptions of their instrumental learning experiences, with a follow-up later in the year; (iii) taking note of N=3,374 children’s instrumental learning achievements according to the systematic assessments by their instrumental tutors at the beginning and end of the school year; (iv) gathering feedback from N=62 instrumental tutors, N=22 headteachers and N=62 parents on their perceptions of ECaM; and (v) undertaking structured observations of N=19 instrumental lessons across a range of instruments to enable conclusions to be drawn about effective instrumental learning and teaching