Musical progressions

Advocating support for the needs of young people across the sector has always been a priority for AYM; we are privileged to have taken a proactive role in setting up an important national network: The Musical Progressions Roundtable (MPR).

The MPR is a network of organisations and individuals involved in music education across the UK, with nearly 300 participants to date.  We’re looking at how, together, we can most effectively support the musical progression of all children and young people: enabling them to fulfill their potential, whatever kind of music they make and whatever their background. The MPR is an open forum for generating ideas and exploring complex issues. Ultimately it’s focused on action: producing practical outputs (including influencing strategy, constructing online tools and developing training models) that will create genuine change for all young people’s music making.

Initially established as a cross-sector dialogue in 2009, co-hosted by AYM, Help Musicians UK and Youth Music, the Musical Progressions Roundtable has been hosted by Awards for Young Musicians and Ben Sandbrook since 2012, with Youth Music funding.

Thanks to further support from Youth Music for national network funding, we were able to host a third phase of the Musical Progressions Roundtable around the country in 2013 and 2014.  Visit www.musical-progressions.org for more information and lots of documents, visualisations and tools.

Recent feedback from participants of the Roundtables:

I think the sessions have been extremely valuable and created a sea-change in how music education professionals think about and support young people’s progression.

I’ve used the progression ingredients and skeleton strategy when developing my own strategy for the department – it has really informed how we’ve put our whole programme together, especially thinking about ‘ingredients.’

The materials have provided an immense amount of stimulus for conversation which will give us fascinating discussion for many months/years.

I have used the materials with all our Hub partners and Music Leads.

Really helped me develop and refine my own thinking around this and influenced the way I talk about progression and “excellence”

Very useful thank you and I hope it continues to challenge and ‘progress’ the music education sector’s views about progression and what excellence and success looks like.

Superb programme. So much material and stimulus to digest and act upon.

Please ensure it continues; the subject is still relevant and will take a long while to embed. It is good having this run by a ‘standalone’ organisation rather than one of the ‘usual suspects.’ The perception is that this allows for a more open discussion.

If you’re interested in getting involved please contact AYM’s Director, Hester Cockcroft.