10 signatures reached
To: Governors, headteacher
Maintain Quality Music at Blackminster Middle School
Pause the dismantling of Blackminster’s existing music provision and disposal of its musical resources, and require the Governing Body to review how the school will maintain high-quality, progressive and properly resourced music education.
- Reconsider the decision to close discrete music provision and explore viable alternatives that retain specialist, progressive music teaching at Blackminster.
- Pause the disposal of instruments, music technology, sheet music, stands and other music resources until the Governing Body has reviewed the future of music at the school and established the provenance of assets acquired through grants, donations, bequests and fundraising.
- Publish a clear music curriculum offer showing how much music pupils in each year group will actually receive, who will deliver it, and how musical skills and knowledge will progress across pupils’ time at Blackminster.
- Guarantee that “Performing Arts” does not result in music becoming an occasional experience within a carousel. Music should retain sufficient curriculum time for meaningful practical music-making, composition, listening, performance and musical development.
- Protect instrumental tuition and ensemble opportunities, including access to peripatetic teachers and opportunities for pupils to participate in bands, choirs and other extracurricular music-making.
- Protect performance opportunities and external musical experiences, including concerts, collaborative/pyramid events with other schools, visiting musicians and artists, trips and opportunities to perform within the community and at larger venues.
- Maintain a viable instrumental stock and music-technology provision so that a child’s ability to participate in practical music is not dependent upon their family being able to purchase or hire an instrument privately.
- Consult pupils, parents, staff, peripatetic teachers, alumni, the PTA, receiving secondary schools and the wider community before making irreversible changes to Blackminster’s music provision.
- Consider progression beyond Blackminster, particularly the relationship with Prince Henry’s High School and other receiving schools with established music, theatre, performance and music-technology provision.
- Publish the Governing Body’s conclusions following that review, including how it intends to ensure that current and future Blackminster pupils continue to receive meaningful, high-quality music education.
- Explore whether the existing resources and community support could be used to rebuild a sustainable music programme rather than disposing of them. Blackminster has previously demonstrated that music can attract external funding, parental support, fundraising income and community partnerships; those possibilities should be investigated before resources accumulated over many years are dispersed.
Why is this important?
“If music be the food of love, play on.” — William Shakespeare
Music at Blackminster isn’t a recent initiative. The school has a remarkable musical tradition stretching back at least to the 1970s and beyond.
Former pupils remember Mr Page and the Blackminster brass band, which competed in the National Brass Band Championships. Albums and LPs still exist featuring Blackminster children singing at schools’ festivals, including recordings associated with Songs of Praise.
For more than half a century, children have walked through Blackminster’s doors and found music waiting for them.
Different children. Different teachers. Different decades.
That tradition continued into more recent generations. At its height, more than half of Blackminster’s pupils received peripatetic instrumental tuition. Children played in a brass band, three choirs, a ukulele group and a drumming group. They took part in musical theatre, Arts Award, community performances and Local Authority pyramid concerts alongside other Worcestershire schools.
Visiting musicians and bands brought the wider musical world into Blackminster. Pupils travelled to experience live music, including the National Brass Band Championships, and performed at venues including Worcester Cathedral, Birmingham’s NIA and Wembley Arena.
Imagine being ten or eleven years old and standing on a stage like that.
And the impact lasted.
Children progressed from Blackminster to GCSE Music; an entire generation of the school brass band did so. Former pupils continued performing into adulthood, and some became music teachers themselves.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because children are given access.
Over decades, teachers, pupils, parents and the community built the infrastructure that made it possible. Grants were secured, money raised and instruments donated. The PTA supported concerts and productions. Peripatetic teachers taught successive generations. Instruments, music technology, stands and sheet music were accumulated and cared for.
We now understand that Blackminster’s discrete music provision is coming to an end, with music instead forming part of a wider Performing Arts rotation. Instruments from the music department are also being offered to others in exchange for donations.
Once those instruments are dispersed, they are gone.
Once ensembles disappear and resources are broken up, a musical culture that took generations to build cannot simply be recreated later.
We are asking Blackminster Middle School and its Governing Body to:
- reconsider the closure of discrete music provision and explore sustainable alternatives;
- pause the disposal of instruments and resources while their provenance, funding and future use are reviewed;
- commit to meaningful, progressive music education, including opportunities to learn instruments, sing, play together, compose, perform and experience live music;
- protect instrumental tuition, ensembles and extracurricular music wherever possible; and
- consult pupils, parents, alumni, peripatetic teachers, receiving schools and the wider community before making irreversible changes.
Blackminster still proudly celebrates former pupils who have achieved remarkable things in music.
They are evidence of what happens when children are given an opportunity.
Somewhere in Blackminster today may be another future musician, teacher, brass player or singer — or simply a child who has never held an instrument and has no idea yet how important music might become in their life.
For more than fifty years, Blackminster children have been given that chance.
Today’s children deserve it too.
Please sign and ask Blackminster Middle School and its Governing Body to protect meaningful music education and a musical tradition generations have spent decades building.
Because you cannot celebrate yesterday’s musicians while taking the instruments out of the hands of tomorrow’s
