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If the government wishes to improve music teaching in Britain, it must first redress the balance between culture and sport, argues parliamentary researcher Adam Gillett.
This week, Ofsted launched its new report into music teaching in primary and secondary schools.
Ostensibly a handy guide for teachers, its more critical aim is startlingly off target.
The faults in music teaching are promptly blamed on "a lack of emphasis on increasing the quality and depth of students' musical responses".
In other words, children aren't learning about music.
This should not come as a surprise.
The arts, already woefully underfunded in Britain, are incredibly difficult to standardise and to teach.
Establishing successful arts teaching in Britain is akin to nailing jelly to a wall.
This is true for the simple reason that, as performance subjects, the arts require a significant supply of cash.
As the watchdog for all school teaching, rather than a spoke in the arts umbrella, Ofsted is making a dangerous statement by asserting poor teaching as the cause of poor musical education.
It is raising its expectations.
It risks leaving a gap that only money can fill.
Without it, music is liable to look worse than ever on the league tables.
This leaves the $64m question – where has all the money gone?
The answer: sport. And not much of it.
It seems that every goal scored by an English footballer merits another million of spending on sports facilities and participation.
Even as we plummeted into the recession last year, Gordon Brown took time to announce that he would be spending an extra £780m on sport for 5 to 16-year-olds.
But it might as well go on chocolate teapots.
Sports England – an organisation set up by government to encourage sporting participation – has done little other than to prove that sporting participation is dropping. Rapidly.
Despite this freefall in sports participation, the government's line remains dogged.
'Every Good Boy Deserves Football,' we are told, a view that earns Britain very few gongs and excludes those whose ambitions don't lie in a muddy field.
At the same time, concerts are being cancelled, venues face the threat of closure and musicians are being laid off left, right and centre.
Even if we had miraculous music teaching in every school, there still wouldn't be jobs for its students. At least, not in Britain.
Ofsted is not a lobbying organisation.
But if the government really wants to improve music teaching in Britain, it must first redress the balance between culture and sport.
It must stop throwing good money after bad, and consider the future of the industries it supports.
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd