Grade Britain
Music exams may have us quaking in our boots, but they’re a valuable path to success, says Andrew Stewart
Scales and arpeggios, like squarebashing for squaddies, have been daily drill for musicians for millennia. Yet it took the Victorians to make them standard measures of skills, included in graded exams as part of a fixed menu of compositions and tests of musicianship. Millions since have experienced the joys and sorrows of the grade system. Many flourish thanks to its stepwise structure, progressing from entry-level grade one to the considerable heights of Grade 8. Others crack under the pressure of performing to an audience of one – the examiner.
And if ‘hands up for more tests’ hardly sounds a dead cert in the teachers’ popularity stakes, the number of people of all ages to take graded exams is on the rise. The sector’s growth has been propelled by bold initiatives from the major exam boards and high demand for internationally recognised qualifications. New markets in China have developed, while grades have also reached parts of Europe formely untouched by such a peculiarly
British export. Those in search of a model for global Britain’s post-brexit role could do worse than look for inspiration to the nation’s providers of music exams.
Part of the secret of the system’s success is that every student can benefit from grades, believes Paul Harris, one of the UK’S leading music educators. Imaginative music teachers, he says, can use exams to test technical and musical proficiency, without restricting their pupils’ attention solely to the demands of three or four exam pieces. They should not be seen as make-or-break tests; rather, they should belong to a genuinely fulfilling all-round education. ‘The aim is to make learning an instrument enjoyable, not put people off,’ Harris observes. ‘As an examiner,
I’ve seen candidates take exams at the wrong time, perhaps for the wrong reasons. But when teachers and parents encourage students to enjoy making music at whatever level they’ve reached, dropping an exam into the learning process is absolutely fine.’
Today’s big players in the grades business are the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) and Trinity College London (TCL). The numbers are impressive. ABRSM assesses over 650,000 candidates annually. It sends examiners to 93 countries, from Andorra to Zimbabwe, to evaluate grades covering 30-plus instruments, singing, jazz and music theory, together with advanced diplomas, ensemble exams and performance assessments for musicians of any age or grade. Ranking among the upper tier of UK charitable organisations, its income is £54 million and expenditure was £50 million-plus in 2017. The board makes substantial donations to the four Royal
Schools, ranging from scholarships and bursaries to money destined to
broaden access. Over £6 million a year goes to international sponsorship to fund music education initiatives worldwide, from a project with orphans and disadvantaged children in Colombia to string playing for all at Hebron School in India’s Tamil Nadu state. The stats for Trinity College London show that it connects with 850,000 candidates in over 70 countries each year, with music leading the way in an exam portfolio that includes English language, drama and speech, rock and pop.
The roots of both institutions stretch back to the 19th century. Trinity started life in 1877 as the external exam board of Trinity College of Music, while the Associated Board followed in 1889; both were alternatives to the prevailing mess of profit-driven private music exams. ABRSM’S founders intended their tests to ‘provide a stimulus and an objective for a high standard of achievement’. Luminaries of the time, the musical knights Sullivan, Stanford
Composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Arthur Somervell were enlisted as examiners
and Parry among them, became members of the board, hoping, as Parry put it, ‘to maintain an attitude of thoroughness in connection with music which will enable it to be most fruitful of good’. In the next generation, composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Arthur Somervell were among those enlisted as examiners.
At first the ABRSM only examined in the
UK, awarding two grades: junior and senior. Next, elementary and advanced learners were included, then a ‘final’ category was added as preface to professional diplomas. Aural tests became part of practical exams in 1920, and the now familiar pattern of eight graded levels was adopted in 1933. The Royal Northern College of Music and Royal Scottish Academy of Music (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) joined the Associated Board in the late 1940s.
The ABRSM reached South Africa in
1892, exams spreading swiftly throughout Britain’s dominions and colonial territories. Overseas expansion continued apace in the
20th century, with exams exported to India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Kenya and other Commonwealth countries. That global reach is key today. The Associated Board’s Music
Commission, for instance, chaired by Sir Nicholas Kenyon, is set to report this year on how students make progress in their learning. Its evidence-based findings will recommend ways to carry children from first lessons to lifelong participation in music. ‘It will have a global relevance for us, even though it’s focused on the UK,’ says Michael Elliott, the ABRSM’S chief executive. ‘While there’s extremely good practice for music in schools throughout the country, the present lack of universality of opportunities is a challenge. We’re finding that we can grow what we’re doing in the UK and internationally. That gives me confidence that an exam system that has served us for 130 years remains the standard system across the world.’
That said, there have been failures as well as distinctions in the grade system story. Exams began to grow tired, wedded to a rigid formula of set pieces drawn from a narrow classical
Exams grew tired, wedded to a formula of set pieces from a narrow repertoire
repertoire. But much has changed in the past two decades. Healthy competition between the boards and fresh thinking about teaching have delivered significant improvements.
The internet revolution has played a part: the ABRSM plans to launch a series of digital resources to help learners make the most of practice sessions, as well as other apps and online materials for pupils and teachers. Online learning for players of electric guitar will arrive soon, while higher grades in ABRSM’S new Singing for Musical Theatre exams are scheduled for later this year. ‘Exams help build resilience, confidence, communication and so on,’ observes Elliott. ‘We wish to make them an enjoyable journey on which people discover the importance of dedication and commitment.’
Trinity College London has gained momentum since Sarah Kemp’s appointment as chief executive. Kemp, formerly director of finance and business affairs at the Royal Opera House, took up the post in 2008 and asked fundamental questions about the board’s purpose. Was it serving the needs of students and teachers? What could it do better? ‘We looked at the idea of “positive impact”,’ recalls TCL’S head of academic governance for music, Francesca Christmas. ‘Exams don’t exist alone on an island. They’re closely connected to the people who take them, to teaching, the resources they require, their impact on society.’ Trinity’s exams, she adds, had maximum impact on the technical abilities of those destined for careers as professional musicians. ‘We began looking at how we could design positive impact across all our exams and recognised the panoply of different ways in which young people make music. We realised we needed to be open to as many ways as possible.’
Trinity now offers options to suit how people teach and make music in different territories, including tests of musical knowledge, improvisation and opportunities for candidates to perform their own compositions. ‘We’ve loosened the syllabus to accommodate local needs,’ says Christmas. ‘We don’t want to impose a stranglehold on the way people teach in Hyderabad or Huddersfield.
‘What the main examining boards offer is recognised by many governments, and as part of qualification frameworks and education attainments in different nations. Places that lack national frameworks for assessment are increasingly turning to graded exam boards for the solution.’
Like their larger competitors, the London College of Music, which launched external
exams in 1888, and Rockschool Ltd (RSL), founded over 100 years later, offer exams accredited by Ofqual that carry UCAS tariff points – used for applications to universities, colleges and conservatoires. Achieving a merit at grade eight, for example, is worth 24 UCAS points, over half the value of a B grade at A level. And the acclaimed contemporary graded exams offered by Rockschool, set up to plug the gap in formal training for rock and pop musicians, won The Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade last year for their global contribution to the creative industries.
And what of the future? Recent research for the Musicians’ Union (MU) supports anecdotal evidence that children from lower-income
‘Children from lowerincome families in the UK are being priced out of music lessons’
families in the UK are being priced out of music lessons. The fact that kids from families earning less than £28,000 a year are half as likely to learn a musical instrument as those from families earning over £48,000 a year has long-term implications for the music profession’s talent pool. David Barnard, music education official at the MU, suggests that instrumental teaching in schools is facing a crisis. ‘I think we need to revisit the ambition set out in England’s National Plan for Music Education, that every child who wishes to learn a musical instrument should not be prevented from doing so by socioeconomic background,’ he says. ‘What I hope to see in schools in future is a focus on the quality of the learning experience, support for the workforce, and a recognition that there should be a wide experience of music at school, including grade exams, open to all who want it.’
The union, notes Barnard, is set to report on the condition of Britain’s school music services and teaching and the effects of the National
Plan. It will also address the collapse of career structures for instrumental teachers in state schools, the paucity of full-time music teaching jobs, and the proliferation of self-employment and zero-hours contracts among the remaining workforce of teachers. ‘If we don’t get this right, then the seeds of learning a musical instrument will fall on barren ground.’
The ABRSM’S Michael Elliott is also determined to halt the UK’S decline in music education. ‘Our starting point is to work in partnership to seek to improve the situation,’ he says. The board, he adds, now supports schools and classroom teachers, offering its Classical100 app to primary schools. More broadly, it is talking to the Department of Education about initiatives to promote music in the state sector.
Guitarist, composer and critic Steph Power has examined for TCL for over a decade. Exams, she suggests, are flexible enough to incorporate individual creativity and prescriptive enough to deliver an objective test of musicianship. How does she respond to those who say they serve as markers of cultural superiority? ‘The point about classical music being “elitist” is a very lazy stereotype. It’s not elitist! Graded exams are a way of guaranteeing inclusivity by offering a level playing field.’ The matter of exclusion, she continues, arises not from the presence of works by Handel and Haydn in a syllabus but from the sharp divide between those whose families can afford to pay for music lessons and those who cannot. ‘Cost is a big issue these days when so many people’s finances are cut to the bone. If schools aren’t employing peripatetic teachers, then music lessons and exams aren’t going to happen because many parents can’t afford them.’
Power recalls the enthusiasm of the local candidates on a recent examining trip to Oman in the Middle East. ‘They’re absolutely fired up,’ she observes. ‘And so are their teachers. Trinity College exams are music centred. It’s not about getting people through exams; it’s about encouraging the expansion of musical curiosity, of encountering new and different ways of expressing yourself musically.’