The place of music in a semi-devolved system of school improvement – the English context

Abstract

In England, there is a National Curriculum in place which is intended to outline what will be taught and learned in each of the required subjects in state schools, music being one of these subjects. However, for some years, a right-wing conservative government has been working on systemic change, which removes many schools from state control and lets them operate independently; these schools are known as “academies.” Alongside this academization program, there has also been considerable governmental intervention in the content of the subject of music in schools. This governmental intervention needs to be viewed against a background of promotion of what the government’s own school inspection body has referred to as “cultural capital,” although this is far removed from Bourdieu’s use of the term and is more concerned with the promotion of what can be seen as middle-class virtues, and bourgeois cultural views.