After three years of campaigning from the music community the future is looking bright for children learning instruments in Scotland.
The Scottish Parliament election is over, new MSPs are inducted and ministers are taking up their portfolios.
All of the parties who now have MSPs in the parliament made similar promises in their manifestos, providing a consensus that free instrumental music tuition in schools must now happen within the next five years.
It’s unprecedented that an issue is uniformly adopted by all parties, the promise of ‘free instrumental music tuition’ repeated almost word for word across all papers. The reason for this must be the powerful arguments made by those from our music community who have campaigned for this loudly over the past three years.
The Music Education Partnership Group, of which Making Music is a member, made working with Scottish Government on the removal of tuition fees one of the key objectives of its 2020-25 strategy. They had great success in accessing those in government who could make that happen and in creating a pilot project (funded by Creative Scotland) to illustrate how to place music education at the heart of the school curriculum – We Make Music.