Everything Exams

For ten years I worked for a regional music service, and these were honestly some of the most magical years of my teaching career and I’m honoured to have worked in this role for so long. I gave individual music lessons to students learning violin, viola and piano plus group music classes to children preparing for their grade 5 theory exams. I experienced an immense sense of satisfaction teaching students from a diverse range of backgrounds, but none more so than in one particular school. 

In this setting, music lessons were funded by the school in exchange for them joining the school orchestras and, as a result, I had students from all socioeconomic backgrounds, not only those with parents wealthy enough to pay for tuition. Some of them had difficult lives, from turbulent homes on low incomes and even child carers. I began to notice a trend with these students – they were all ‘successful’, lovely kids, and most of them continued their educational journey into the sixth form and many moved on to university. 

This prompted me to investigate a bit deeper into whether their success was something to do with the music lessons they were having – here are my top 3 discoveries:

1. Learning a musical instrument can enhance children’s cognitive skills by over 20% and their grades by over 15%. This is mind blowing – but understandable when you think about it. It also applies even if your child doesn’t have ambitions to be the next Mozart child prodigy but learns for fun for a few years. My son got to Grade 5 violin and decided that his time was up playing music – but by then, all the good had been done, he had experienced a real brain workout over a prolonged period of time – objective achieved. Your child’s brain development and therefore brain structure is affected when playing a musical instrument since the act of reading pieces of music, translating that information into body movements, listening to what you produce, then feeding this information back into your brain so that adjustments can be made, mean that your brain fires up in multiple brain regions at once, building neural pathways between brain cells in the process. Essentially, when using their instrument, your child is playing cognitive brain games. Children’s motor skills are developed and the cognitive benefits of your child’s musical training are then useful when they carry out other tasks in school unrelated to music, and academic success then becomes easier for them. Going further, if your child learns music by heart, their memory skills are exercised and brain development continues. 


2. Social skills, sense of community and confidence will improve. Having a positive sense of well-being can have quite an impact on academic success. With most instruments, especially orchestral instruments, playing in groups is a great way to meet other people and develop social skills. Even if classical music isn’t your child’s thing, there are usually bands and choirs which they could join from other genres of music. Instead of the classical music pathway, there are other popular curricula they could follow to build musical skills such as Rockschool and the School of Rock. In group playing, members need to share music, listen to each other so that they coordinate their playing and work as a team. Collaboration skills are needed. Being part of a community like this can give a child a place in life, an instant social circle and can in turn help them with confidence and even their mental health. They get the opportunity to play in concerts giving them a sense of pride in what they have achieved. Concert audiences usually include delighted parents, siblings and grandparents which is brilliant for a community and a cherry on the cake benefit for parents. Students in the schools I worked in had the opportunity to travel to other countries to do concerts. These tours helped them develop closer friendships with each other along the way across year groups so that when they returned to school, younger students felt supported and valued by older members of the school.  I’ve traveled to other parts of the world with my violin, where I don’t speak the language, and another benefit of being able to play a musical instrument is that I’ve had an instant connection with other players – in a way, my playing gave me universal language skills.


3. Concentration levels and  consciousness about work will increase. Studies have shown that students learning an instrument are more conscientious and find it easier to concentrate. In our world of short, sharp snippets of information thrown at our children online, their ability to concentrate can be compromised. With music, it is only by focussing on the now and what your mind and body are doing that you progress from week to week. This helps build the ability to concentrate. It’s also up to them to organise their time to practise, get to rehearsals and watch the time so that they make it to lessons. This all takes effort and focus. If they are part of a community, the enjoyment they receive from being part of that team spurs them on to want to do these things, incentivising them to become more organised, conscientious and concentrate on their improvement. 
   
   I hope I’ve managed to convince you of the benefits of including music education as part of your child’s life. If you are worried about costs, benefits can still be gained even if you don’t pay for lessons. Take a look at YouTube videos or perhaps buy a book to show you how to play the recorder or guitar. Whichever way you go, I hope you include music as part of your journey 🎶 

References:

1.    Hille, Adrian and Schupp, Juergen, How Learning a Musical Instrument Affects the Development of Skills. ISA Discussion Paper No. 7655, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2342527   

2.   Halliday, Josh, (2017), ‘How to improve the school results: not extra maths but music, loads of it’, The Guardian, 3/10/2017, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/03/school-results-music-bradford, (accessed: 7/5/2021)