The Accessibility of Music as an Academic Subject

My research centres around the National Curriculum for Music, evaluating the discourses that take place between government ministers, professionals within the field of education, and the broader public. Using Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, this research would have a distinct focus on how children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds fare in such discussions, analysing the extent to which different groups involved in the formation of the curriculum advocate for the needs of these young people - and indeed what different groups believe their needs to be - and subsequently how far these discussions are represented in the final statutory document of the National Curriculum and non-statutory guidance. Combined with this document analysis, I would undertake ethnographic fieldwork and hold interviews in selected case study schools to evaluate how the National Curriculum is implemented in school Music lessons, asking teachers and children and young people from different socioeconomic backgrounds about their engagement with Music as an academic subject and comparing this data with the document analysis detailed above.
Given that fewer than 1% of A-levels are taken in Music, almost 20% of schools fail to offer Music to students at GCSE, and yet Music is still claimed by the government in the National Curriculum to be "a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity" (2014), the study of Music as an academic subject in UK education institutions is confined to a relatively small margin of society. Sound and Music, for example, write about the funnelling
effect that takes place at every stage of education, narrowing the diversity of the student body.
Research by Georgina Born and Kyle Devine demonstrates that over 30% of students taking Tradition Music degrees in the UK attended independent schools (2007/08 to 2011/12). At the University of Oxford, 52% of Music undergraduates were educated in the private sector (2015-17), both figures illustrating a vast overrepresentation of the 7% of independently-educated pupils nationally. Given that 98% of people in Britain own some form of stored or recorded music (Bennett et al., 2009), this dichotomy between the prevalence of music as a popular cultural form and the accessibility of music as an academic subject necessitates research as part of broader studies analysing educational inequality in the UK.