Redeployment and retraining are discussed at length, as well as “career counselling with the BBC Jobshop”. What, Mr Blunkett, is your comment on this?I HAVE JUST been reading a rather grim letter. But the equipment at her disposal was exactly the same as mine – a piano and a record player. Sometimes, she said, she simply used her voice and a tambourine. Instruments, in other words, are not the only means by which a child learns music. But as this same teacher pointed out, they offer a splendid discipline for hand and mind, and a unique satisfaction when mastered.

In this school only one pupil in five is learning an instrument, and even that is well above the local average. Moreover, despite this school’s strong musical bias, 40 minutes music per week is all that can be fitted into each child’s crowded timetable. To remind myself of the realities, and to see what had changed since my own days as a music teacher, I eavesdropped this week on lessons at a Haringey school.The teacher in question was a former concert pianist with a charismatic manner and a very clear idea of what she wanted to achieve: her lessons were exemplary. I have every sympathy with the piano- makers currently going to the wall, but I don’t think the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, had their interests in mind when he expressed the pious wish that every child should learn an instrument.BUT WHERE is the Government in all this? While the Tories’ national curriculum gave music new status as a “foundation subject”, Blunkett’s insistence on the three Rs is driving music out to the margin again. If this doesn’t happen, he says, a vacuum will develop into which profiteers will rush, first selling instrumental tuition and then – when the market is nicely softened up – selling the instruments which bring in the bucks. Here is the great inequality: while some children get superb musical opportunities, others get none at all. And as Westland points out, this inequality is growing starker.His response, published last month, takes the form of a sensible proposal that music teaching should be run by a new national network, operating in partnership with local authorities.

The first is the regularity with which certain groups crop up, and the second concerns the high number of groups from rural areas. “The health of one reflects the health of the other.” And if you look at the provenance of players at the Prom, two sobering facts become apparent. A mere 437 children played in the first festival: last year a staggering 40,000 participated. This year has been the first to see a slight downturn, which director Larry Westland attributes to the spiralling costs of travelling to perform, and to the schools’ descent into penury. Yet these events carry a torch for that necessary amateurism without which professional music in Britain would slowly but surely founder.

Ask the players of any orchestra and you will find they almost all cut their teeth here.”Where music education goes, we go,” says Westland. Yet the young musicians at the Albert Hall were not prodigies: they had simply been encouraged to discover what they could do. And once children make that discovery, there is no holding them back.
When I helped to plan the first of these events 26 years ago, I had serious doubts about its viability It’s wonderful to be proved so wrong. And it has been exhilarating to watch the growth of the National Festival of Music for Youth, of which these Proms are a distillation. It was also a reminder of the extent to which we underestimate children’s abilities. The stock media image of the teenager is a self-fulfilling prophecy: we now expect them to be zombies, rotting their brains with the aid of fashion accessories, drugs, and televisual junk. But the players delivering the big sound were strikingly small: Turnfurlong Jazz from Aylesbury consists of children aged between eight and 12.