Cohort 2025 Research Placement Project
About The Project
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire are creative hubs but, according to a Counter Culture report (ACE funded, 2022), while they have ‘most of the elements that can be combined into a strategy to comprise a Music City; it does not yet have the strategy’. Nationally, music provision is suffering. The Cultural Learning Alliance reported in May 2024 that Arts education in schools is a ‘stark picture of erosion and inequality’. 42% of schools no longer enter any pupils for Music GCSE, the vacancy rate for teachers of Music has increased six fold, and teacher recruitment in Music has dropped by 56%. We recognise that this will have a consequent effect on talent development, cultural and arts organisations and venues, culture and community of a place, health and wellbeing, and more.
Nottingham and Nottinghamshire have live music venues, a wide variety of music outputs, varied audiences, and a highly respected music education system. Also, the Universities for Nottingham have embarked on a three-year partnership with the BBC Concert Orchestra, running from 2023-2026. It is the collective hope that this partnership supports the already strong musical and cultural offer and provision of the city and the wider area, supports talent development and retention in Nottinghamshire, enables greater access to a wider range of music education and performance, and reaches less-reached communities and contributes to wider social impact, including wellbeing outcomes.
To address this, a Nottinghamshire Music Steering Group has recently been established (September 2024), bringing together over 20 organisations involved in music education, provision, events, and performances.
Collectively, this group recognised the need to provide a more joined-up approach to the delivery, provision, and opportunities for music education and performance for children and young people across Nottinghamshire. At the moment, there is a severe drop off in music access and engagement from children in Nottinghamshire after primary school.
This project therefore arises out of this identified community and partner need to address the engagement with and communication of music provision, events, opportunities, and performances for children and young people. The outcome of this project will be to create an inclusive and accessible visualisation of all music-related activity that children and young people can access in the region, enabling children and young people, parents and carers to know the opportunities on offer and, simultaneously, enabling the community and cultural organisations to have a holistic overview of the provision and identify gaps and areas of future focus.
Project Aims
The research aims are as follows:
- To consult children and young people from across the region to amplify their voices and uncover what they would like to see in terms of their region’s music provision in the future.
- To understand the current landscape of children and young people-accessible music education, events, performance, and other music-related opportunities across the region.
- To visualise this information in an accessible and inclusive way for children, young people, parents, carers, and organisations to know what the current offer is.
- To understand the gaps in the provision in terms of: age, geographical area, musical genre/style/form.
Project Team
- Research Candidate: Jaysika Dennis
- Lead Supervisor: Dr Peter Woods, University of Nottingham
- Co-Supervisor: Dr Elizabeth Kelly, University of Nottingham
- Co-Supervisor: Dr Carol Adlam, Nottingham Trent University
- Community Supervisor: Sooree Pillay, Orchestras Live