Closing university music departments does not chime with common sense

It is a sad and familiar refrain. After a year of industrial discord and tightening budgets, a strong and vibrant academic music department is, once again, closed – this time, as confirmed this week, at Oxford Brookes University.

The implications for the staff and students involved are devastating. Yet the wider issue is a structural failure across the UK sector to share and articulate a narrative that supports the role of music education for society. There is an urgent need to frame a more integrated and compelling argument that the loss of music from the curriculum, at university level and below, would cause irreparable damage to the country and the world we live in.

The urban myth that studying music does not lead to positive economic and career outcomes is not sustained by the hard data. A recent 20-year longitudinal survey of more than 9,000 graduates published by the University of Oxford demonstrated that music students go on to a very broad range of career destinations including as teachers, solicitors, barristers and consultants. Music graduates possess the skills most valued by employers, including creativity, adaptability, critical thinking and the ability to analyse large amounts of complex non-linguistic information.

Moreover, music departments in universities provide a pipeline of talent that powers the creative industries: a sector that has been growing at more than 1.5 times the rate of the wider UK economy for the past decade, and which the government wants to grow by £50 billion by 2030. We cannot achieve this goal without music graduates.

These graduates teach millions in schools and communities, sharing music’s extensively evidenced benefits for personal and social development, health and well-being. They stage and perform high-quality productions reaching millions of people, adding £6.7 billion in value to the UK economy last year, according to UK Music’s 2023 report.

It is also vital that we do not lose the rich and transformative research coming out of university music departments. Music research helps us to understand our history and the development of language, culture and identity. It explores how music can change and improve lives, such as recent findings from Nottingham and Stirling universities that show how music helps residents in care homes.

Despite this evidence, the struggles faced by academic music departments indicate that the music education pipeline is broken. The reasons are numerous, but the diagnosis is clear. The Department for Education’s data shows a fall of more than 20 per cent in GCSE music entries between 2014 and 2019, while the number of secondary school music teachers fell by more than 1,000 in the same period. City and county music services, which have been the mainstay of local provision and were fundamental to my own experience as a state-school pupil in the south-east of England, have suffered budget cuts and chronic underfunding. Access to high-quality music education is narrowing at precisely the moment when the impact of a fully integrated and inclusive music curriculum could be most transformative.

At heart, it is a problem of perception and investment, both public and institutional. As long as academic music departments are seen as high-cost, niche and unaffordable, music’s role in the academy will remain contingent at best. Music’s regrettable omission from the Russell Group’s list of “facilitating subjects”, now corrected, had a marked negative effect on recruitment to both A levels and degrees and was indicative of a failure to grasp the subject’s depth and the extent to which it is interconnected with other disciplines, within the humanities and beyond.

What is needed is a genuine commitment from all sides – government, schools, universities, research funding bodies and industry – to pursue a properly integrated and coherent pathway that offers a dynamic and innovative music curriculum for all students. That commitment requires resourcing (both financial and human) and, crucially, infrastructure. It also requires a degree of ambition, leadership and imagination that recognises music’s role in a diversified and progressive economy.

University music departments need to work in a more synchronised fashion, in partnership with the national music hubs, and support is needed for closer engagement with the creative industries and other sector partners. There is scope here for internships, work placements and training, and a renewed dedication to the academic endeavour.

And we should not be defensive about making the intellectual case for music studies on their own terms, resisting the temptation to over-instrumentalise or resort to flatly utilitarian claims. An intervention as transformative as the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Creative Industries Clusters Programme has been for screen and immersive technologies is needed to draw together all parts of the music sector: academic, industry, professionals, teachers and students.

By working together across the sector, we can ensure the UK remains a global music powerhouse. Academic music departments in universities have a pivotal role to play in that process: as sites of creative innovation, excellence, access and opportunity. If we can share that vision and resituate music at the heart of the academy, we might finally begin to sing a different refrain.

Daniel Grimley is professor of music and head of humanities at the University of Oxford.