Baseline study conclusions:

A study spanning just a few hours over two afternoons can provide merely a ‘snapshot’ of the field, of the level of practical music teaching and the overall teaching styles of the three participating teachers.

Despite this, and helped by the intricacy of my notes where I tried to recall everything –providing a thick description in Finney’s terms through which the reader is ‘smelling the carpet’ (Finney, 2015: blog post 30/04/15)– the baseline study provided an understanding of the music activities already occurring, the teacher’s ‘real’, rather than their own perceived levels of their musical knowledge and skill, and the children’s responses to the current musicking. My observations confirmed the status quo of primary teachers striving to teach music yet feeling consistently ill equipped in terms of confidence, skill and resource. That this was still some four years after Holden and Button’s (2006) study further confirmed the timeliness and potential worth of my own research enquiry. Furthermore, the insights gleaned from and recorded in the commentaries above were extremely useful in terms of informing the design of the field study when it commenced in the following term.

The baseline observations supported Enid’s initial claims that the school was first and foremost concerned with the positive role education and the school itself should play in enriching the children’s lives. In each classroom there was a clear commitment to ensuring that children felt safe and happy in the school environment, echoing the work of Noddings:

The best homes and schools are happy places. The adults in these happy places recognise that one aim of education (and of life itself) is happiness. They also recognise that happiness serves as both means and end. Happy children, growing in their understanding of what happiness is, will seize their educational opportunities with delight, and they will contribute to the happiness of others. Clearly, if children are to be happy in schools, their teachers should also be happy. Too often we forget this obvious connection. (Noddings, 2003: 261)

Enid’s attitude towards the teaching staff was nurturing and, as Nodding’s suggests will happen, this subsequently cascaded to the children via the teachers’ encouraging and kind classroom management styles.

The initial conversation with Enid and the first meeting with the teachers confirmed a prevailing belief among them of the importance of music as an integral element of children’s educational experience.

The singing I observed supported Patricia’s assertion that a lack of confidence probably resulted from a lack of training and knowledge about how to confidently lead singing. This meant that they were unable to direct the children in terms of how to best use and develop their singing voices. This was an issue of primary concern for me at this stage. The seriousness of the impact of teachers being unable to provide suitable guidance and activity on the development of children’s singing potential is touched upon by Welch:

At any age, development can be supported or hindered by a number of factors, such as the appropriateness of a given singing task set by an adult in relation to current singing capabilities, the expectations of peers and/or on the value placed on singing (and certain types of singing behaviour) within the immediate culture. (Welch, 2006: 325)

Nevertheless, while the baseline study showed Welch’s first factor to be an issue in this case, the value placed on singing within the immediate culture of the school was not an area for concern. In the main, the attitudes towards singing of the children themselves through their engagement with it as a class activity were observed to be positive and as these were very young children, the effect of the expectations of peers was assumed to be low with the possible exception of the effect of gender on attitudes towards singing discussed in relation to the work of Welch in the commentary on the observation in Ruth’s class.

Despite their self-proclaimed lack of musical knowledge, Ruth and Patricia demonstrated that they were able to identify, select and teach more complex songs in order to develop the children’s repertoire beyond simple nursery rhymes. Their reasons for doing so were not explained to me at this point but it is possible that this was in response to National Curriculum guidelines for this age group, in place at the time of the study and to date, which state that:

Pupils should be taught to: use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes. (Excerpt from DFE website, 201348)

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These more complex songs also provided scope for cross-curricular learning such as the cauliflower song’s link to harvest festival, which may be an alternative or additional reason for their selection and use.

It was evident that all three teachers were indeed under-confident about teaching music in their classrooms, and in line with the findings of Hennessey (2000), shared a belief that to be ‘musical’, or to be a musician as an adult, required the technical skill of being able to play an instrument. However, there was simultaneous agreement among them that all children were musical regardless of technical skill.

In terms of the children, the baseline observations showed that what I was told in the first meeting about the high levels of speech, language and communication needs was indeed the case and this is also borne out in the aforementioned, contemporary Ofsted report. These high levels of special educational need presented a variety of challenges for both teaching and learning noted during my observations to include; only very short periods of whole class attention and engagement, some withdrawn and unconfident children, some very dominant children and in the main, boys being more confident to contribute ideas than girls. The children’s engagement with singing appeared to be high and enthusiasm increased when more challenging repertoire was offered and when they were invited to contribute ideas and have some agency over activity.