As Music GCSE Fades Out, It's Time To Lift The Tempo

Turntable tuition can engage pupils alienated by more traditional forms of musical instruction, finds Dave Jenkins – so should more teachers be embracing electronic dance music in their classrooms, at a time when the genre’s popularity is soaring?

- Dave Jenkins

Music teachers: do you know your jungle from your drum ‘n’ bass? Your crab scratch from your chirpscratch? Your filter from your flange?

If the answer is no, read on: there may be more benefits to knowing these things than just seeming a little more lit than your peers.

Why? Here comes the drop…

Music is struggling in schools. In England, the number of entrants for music GCSE has fallen every year since 2016, from 41,578 to 34,780 this year. In Scotland, the decline in entries for Higher music is less severe, but still dropping over the same period, with a 2 percent dip between 2017and 2018.

Yet recent statistics, published in the University of Birmingham’s Youth Musicreport, state that 97 percent of the youths surveyed had listened to music within the past week and 67 percent had engaged in some form of music-making activity.

These numbers don’t beat-match. So what’s going wrong?

According to a growing number of teachers, schools just aren’t teaching the instruments or content that some teens are interested in. And to fix that, a small group of schools has started to offer DJ-decks lessons and are facilitating the use of the kit for exams, too.

You might be thinking: what took them so long? Dance music is hardly new – ravers have been waving glow sticks around since the 1980s. But it is only recently that exam boards have accepted DJ decks as an instrument, as part of the changes for the new exam specifications, so it’s only in the past few years that schools will have been able to justify the switch.

Those that have done so say the decision has enabled an obvious solution to the poor take-up of music for exam courses.

“Music lessons weren’t capturing the imagination of students who hadn’t been interested in traditional instruments,” explains John Warring, head of music at Birkdale High School in Southport.