Music is unique in its power to involve the whole person, intellectually as well as emotionally and kinaesthetically. Our ultimate aim in music education, therefore, should be to develop musical imagination and understanding. We can achieve this by making composition and improvisation the central focus of the music curriculum, with listening activities carefully related to children's work. Musical experiences in the classroom should be adventurous, challenging, joyful yet serious, taking place in an atmosphere of warm, sympathetic, tolerant, and respectful relationships. In this environment, children are more likely to value music, and to develop sensitivity not only to music, but to other people. Schools too often underestimate children's potential. In music we can help all children to experience a sense of achievement, leading to greater self-respect.

The article suggests that ‘Composing / Performing / Listening’ may be an inadequate way to categorise musical activities, particularly because any musical activity is a sort of listening. There is a discussion of the educationally crucial difference between ‘audience-listening’ on the one hand, and ‘composition-listening’ and ‘performance-listening’ on the other. It is suggested that musical experience is itself thinking embodied in sound, and that explicit ‘analysis-of-listening’ plays a supportive role.

In this light, the article proposes an alternative way to categorise musical activities, and indicates some possible conclusions for the curriculum and for assessment.

Music education in Scotland has a long-standing tradition of community singing, originally taught using the sol-fa method. Virtually every Scottish secondary school possesses cupboards full of dusty piles of Burns song books and Hebridean folk tunes with the sol-fa and the rhythm printed underneath. Some may still be in use! Sol-fa is not nearly so prevalent in schools as it was twenty years ago, but for the majority of Scottish schools singing still forms the backbone of music classes. After all, there are definite advantages of ‘singing’ as opposed to ‘music’ classes; large numbers of children can be taught together, there is probably less preparation or effort involved for the teacher, and other staff, parents, and the pupils themselves may readily accept that music in school is singing.

Looking back now at my first year of teaching I am amazed at the wide diversity of activities on which I was launched. As well as teaching the 11–18 age group, I was also organising visits, arranging musical performances both in and out of school, serving on a local committee of the Schools Music Association, organising and accompanying Associated Board practical exams, helping with the day-to-day running of the department when the head left for another job, and still trying to increase my own abilities as a musician. My overwhelming impression is that I was always tremendously busy and nearly always under pressure as the days sped by bringing exams and concerts nearer and nearer.

Probation – a word I had always associated with the prison service rather than teaching. In my early naïvety I thought it rather derogatory to use this word to describe my first year as a teacher. A four-year university course was surely enough, I felt, to allow me to remove the learner label and to be fully qualified. But, as I gradually came to realise, the first year in full-time teaching was as much a learning process for me as it was for my pupils.

My training had consisted of a three-year Music and Education degree followed by a one-year PGCE course. I am not entirely certain that PGCE courses are the most effective means of training teachers, because their brevity limits the amount of time spent in schools. However, the system does allow the opportunity of more specialised study first, and I am grateful to have been able to do a teacher training course as well. The breadth of the PGCE studies confused me. At times I wondered whether the study of educational psychology and sociology would be better replaced by more down-to-earth advice on lesson preparation and the control of difficult classes. In retrospect I realise that virtually all the work was useful and, anyway, the music tutorials covered practical matters.

This year the Jamaica School of Music is celebrating its twenty-first anniversary. The period under review coincides almost exactly with that in which Jamaica has been an independent nation and inevitably there has been a great deal of social, cultural and economic upheaval that has been reflected in the school.

During the first ten years (1961–1972) British influence was strong and the school was modelled on the Royal Schools of Music, with few gains in terms of trained professional skills.

In the period 1972–1983 the school was completely reorganized as a pluralistic and identifiably Jamaican institution with the introduction of full-time curricula designed for training specialists in African–American Music, Western (classical) Music and Music in Education, with due emphasis on Jamaica's rich folk tradition: in educational terms an innovation that often placed the school in conflict with society.