It is a truth universally acknowledged that playing an instrument helps children in many aspects of school life - well, at least in the fraternity of music teachers it is. Until recently, however, we have been in want of evidence to support our theory. These are big claims that are tricky to test: it’s tremendously hard to prove that instrumental music-making trains and increases a child’s cognitive capacity; that commitment to regular practice and rehearsal can have effects on motivation beyond the rehearsal room; and that succeeding and failing together in an ensemble can change the way we feel about ourselves and the way we relate to others.

This want of evidence is becoming a problem for our children’s education. The recent report Music Education: State of the Nation describes dwindling secondary curriculum hours for music, fewer specialist music teachers and states, yet again, the damaging effects of the English Baccalaureate. Entries for GCSE music have fallen by 18.6 per cent since 2014 (Daubney, Spruce and Annetts, 2019).

So we should all sit up and take notice of a new study, published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Education Psychology (Guhn, Emerson and Gouzouasis, 2019). It’s a big piece of work, exploring the records of nearly 113,000 Canadian pupils, and it makes a powerful central claim - that “students highly engaged in music were, on average, academically over one year ahead of their peers not engaged in school music”.

The study takes academic outcomes - mathematics and science achievement in the chosen cohort at the age of 15 or 16 (Canadian grade 10), as well as English achievement at both 15 or 16 and 17 or 18 - and compares them with involvement in music, instrumental and vocal, measured by the number of music classes taken. The effects are positive in all cases, but strongest when comparing academic success with involvement in instrumental music. The greater the engagement, the stronger the effect; the longer the engagement, the greater the benefit seen.

The usual caveats apply to these numbers. Pupils come to us from different social and varied cultural backgrounds, with a diversity of prior experience in music as well as in life, and all are unique in their initial motivation to succeed.

But the study’s results are striking nonetheless. And such a study helps us to make a new case for instrumental music in schools, which goes like this: time is the most precious resource of all, funding is never enough. In the pursuit of the best outcomes for our pupils, could it be that getting students to play in a band or an orchestra is a better use of time and money than additional lessons in English or mathematics?

If musicians are to make this case, then it’s useful to look more deeply at what the authors suggest. They posit three “mechanisms” that tie music making to academic success.

1. Executive functioning

The first is executive functioning, which incorporates a set of skills much like the slow, deliberate, logical modes of thinking found in Daniel Kahneman’s System 2 (Kahneman, 2011) that support our ability to focus attention, our cognitive flexibility and our inhibition (self-regulation), and are also associated with efficiency in using short-term memory. All of these skills can be trained, improved and better directed (Diamond, 2013). Without memory, without openness to the alternate view, without attention and a certain self-discipline, time in the instrumental rehearsal room would be at best unproductive, at worst - with fragile, expensive and sharp instruments to hand - potentially dangerous.

2. Motivation

This mechanism concerns the development of pupils’ motivation. Instrumental music making teaches the relationship between effort and reward, the stages through which one must pass in order to master complex skills; in its participants, it builds understanding of what Hattie’s “overlearning” (practising newly acquired skills beyond the point of initial mastery) looks like and how to achieve it; and develops strong and efficient strains of self-efficacy (Hattie, 2012; Bandura, 2006).

3. Achievement

The third describes the sense of personal achievement and self-worth to be gained both from instrumental music making and from academic success; it might be expanded to encompass the great gifts to be gained from working with others in a common endeavour (Hallam, 2010).

It’s interesting that, in the enhancement of academic outcomes, instrumental music seems here to be more effective than singing. Perhaps it’s because the mastery of an instrument requires conscious development of brute stamina as well as fine motor skills; perhaps the unnatural, hard-at-first act of learning to play any instrument presents a desirable difficulty, the overcoming of which is a catalyst to further knowledge about how to learn, practise and improve.

Or perhaps it’s simply because learning an instrument is a perfect metaphor for learning itself. As an instrumentalist, you learn to practise regularly, every day; you understand how to disassemble your task into smaller component parts, working on each in turn; you become resilient and honest enough to know that sometimes it’s neither easy nor fun but that the eventual results will justify the present effort. You develop a one-to-one relationship with an expert, an adult, your teacher. He or she sets a goal for you in your lesson, expects from you in the next the performance of a task that is slightly beyond your current ability but not dauntingly so. You then have a week of daily work in which to master it, but that work is done unsupervised; you teach yourself.

All instrumental teachers know that moment in the development of their charges when you see a pupil cross the Rubicon of practice; when they understand that the harder you work, the better you get and that there are few limits to what is possible.

Once experienced, that threshold applies not just in music.

If this suggestion of a link between instrumental music and academic progress is to be convincing enough to change our curricula and our cultures, we need two things: more evidence and good, funded solutions to the practical problems.

The funding for the Wider Opportunities programme, for example - promoting whole-class instrumental music-making - seems to me to be a wholly good thing but much too short in its duration. What comes after a term or a year of free instrumental lessons needs to be addressed - that critical point when the habits of practice have a chance of becoming ingrained, of growing into a life-changing addiction. The practical watershed is when parents are first asked to make a financial contribution. That contribution needs to be very skilfully matched with their ability to pay, and might be set at little more than a token amount. We value things for which we pay far more than those that are free, and this payment is an investment in a child’s future. Funding to extend the length of the scheme could make an enormous difference.

Meanwhile, there are concerted and impressive efforts to gather a stronger evidence base but more would be welcome.

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation is, for example, promoting five pilot schemes to test the impact of cultural learning and how best to collect, analyse and use evidence. One of the five, the work of the Tees Valley Music Service in association with the British Kodály Academy, is proving to be of especial interest (Londesborough, Partridge, Bath and Grinsted, 2017).

Music teachers have always had faith in the importance of instrumental music in the lives of our pupils. The evidence seen in this new report helps to confirm, strengthen and renew our belief that music making helps children and schools, and is a good for us all.

Martin Leigh is director of music at King Edward’s School, Birmingham

This article originally appeared in the 1 November 2019 issue under the headline “This research could be music to your ears…”