I would like to express my concerns over the reintroduction of assignments next year for Higher and Advanced Higher Music.

I would like you to consider the following. The upcoming 6th years were in S2 when the first lockdown took place. At this stage, most music teachers were trying to work out how they were going to teach their pupils and most of us were working towards getting results right for our senior pupils. I would say the latter was the biggest priority we had. Providing meaningful music ‘home’ work was difficult as most young people did not have access to musical instruments and some didn’t have access to the internet and were receiving paper packs home with no music work other than literacy. It is fair to say at this point that very few, if any, schools were providing composition work at this point.

Moving on to the next lock down in 2021, the 2004 year group were in S3 and using my school as a gauge, the engagement of S3 was not as high as we would have hoped. Again, our S3 pupils did not have instruments at home as we were using our resources for senior pupils and albeit, the IT resources were getting better, it was not equitable across the full year group. This meant the work that was given out had to be achievable by all. Many pupils were using mobile phones to access Teams meetings and therefore were not able to download software that could be used for composition. Therefore, to make it equitable, composition was not done. When the pupils returned to school, as with the return from the first lockdown, our focus was to get pupils back on to instruments and getting the playing standard up as it had dropped during the lock down.

As this year group moved in to S4, they were in classes where time was taken up by cleaning instruments at the start and end of every period as well as hand sanitisation and table cleaning which all in all took around ten minutes of learning time away from the each lesson. All of the above was taken into account by SQA and as such, you made cuts to the performance programme and the composition was removed for which teachers were extremely grateful.

The following year, which for most would be their Higher year, was also affected by teacher strikes and again, teaching time was cut, for some schools by a much larger proportion than others. With composition not being an examinable assignment, a minimal amount of this would have been done.

Now, looking at the year ahead, I have 11 advanced Higher pupils that are expected to do a composition and their last best experience of this was S1. Would we expect a grade 1 piano pupil who hadn’t played very much in five years to then sit a grade 5 exam with 9 months to prepare?

Composition is a skill that is built up over time and I strongly believe that we are putting our young people under a stress that is unnecessary and will cause many of our young people to pull out of a subject that they really enjoy.

A more progressive and supportive return to SQA assignments such as Music would allow for more sufficient skill progression and preparation for the composition assignment, which is already a challenging element to teach and ultimately provide higher pupil attainment figures. 
 
I am more than happy for the National 5 to return to composition and then for it to be a phased return. I think this would be fair for teachers and pupils alike.