Why Music Education Matters

Wellbeing

Music and mental health

For young people especially, music offers something that is hard to replicate: a space to process emotion, express identity, and feel part of something larger than themselves. The ABRSM’s Making Music survey of 2021 found that music’s role in mental health was consistently rated among its most important benefits — by learners, teachers, and parents alike.^[1]

Youth Music’s Sound of the Next Generation report (2024, surveying over 2,100 young people in the UK) found that making and listening to music is the top spare-time activity for young people — above sport, social media, and gaming.^[2]

Nordoff and Robbins, the UK’s largest music therapy charity, reached nearly 17,000 people across 13 centres in 2024 — delivering over 54,000 sessions. Their work is evidence of how central music is to human wellbeing at every stage of life.^[3]

The National Picture

A subject in crisis — and a plan to save it

The government itself recognised the importance of music education when it published The Power of Music to Change Lives: A National Plan for Music Education in 2022. Its stated vision is clear:^[4]

Music Mark, the UK’s membership organisation for music education, is clear that music should be an entitlement for every child — an integral part of school life, not an optional extra.^[5]

The Independent Society of Musicians (ISM), the professional body for musicians since 1882, campaigns for exactly this — warning that the current accountability framework is undermining access to music education across the country.^[6]

Yet despite this national consensus, the reality on the ground tells a different story:

These are not isolated cases. They are a pattern — and every school that drops GCSE Music adds to it.

The Bigger Picture

Music is a career, a culture, and an economy

The UK’s creative industries are one of its great economic success stories. In 2024, they contributed £247.6 billion to the UK economy — growing at more than four times the rate of the economy as a whole.^[10]

Music alone contributed £7.6 billion to UK GDP in 2024, with exports reaching £4.6 billion. The music industry employs over 216,000 people in this country.^[11]

Every musician, producer, sound engineer, composer, music teacher, or arts administrator started somewhere. Most started at school. The pipeline begins — or ends — with decisions like the one being made at Anthony Gell right now.

Local Heritage

Wirksworth has always been a musical town

This is not a community that has to be persuaded of music’s value. It already knows.

Music at St Mary’s Church has deep roots: the parish installed a pipe organ as early as 1826, and replaced it in 1899 with a prestigious three-manual Brindley & Foster instrument.^[12] Wirksworth is also said to be the inspiration for “Snowfield” in George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) — Eliot’s aunt Elizabeth Evans, who lived in Wirksworth, was the model for the novel’s preacher Dinah Morris — and the novel depicts a community in which communal singing was woven into daily life.^[13]

The Wirksworth Community Orchestra was established in September 1983 and has performed ever since, bringing together around 50 amateur musicians for concerts at venues across Derbyshire.^[14] The Wirksworth Festival — now a landmark 10-day celebration of arts and music — began in 1979 with a £1,000 grant from the town council.^[15]

Today, Wirksworth Music Centre — based at Anthony Gell School, where it uses the school’s facilities every Saturday morning — offers ensembles for children from reception through to sixth form, from beginners to advanced level.^[16] Anthony Gell itself runs a School Orchestra, Urban Choir, Vocalise vocal group, and Rock School, with concerts, exam performance evenings, and a Musical Production each year.^[17]

Anthony Gell sits at the heart of this musical community. Its proposal not to offer GCSE Music to the current Year 9 cohort would leave those students without a single performing art at GCSE — no Music, no Drama, no Dance. That is what this campaign is about.