The specialist music school for Edinburgh is housed in Broughton High. Its entrance looks out on to playing fields, and directly behind - clearly visible above the trees that border the grounds - are the clock tower, spires and turrets of Fettes College, Scotland’s most expensive private school. Families here pay up to £34,800 a year for their children to attend.

It would, of course, be impossible for Broughton to compete on an aesthetic level with the historic grandeur of that building. Luckily, it doesn’t have to, because, having been rebuilt in 2009, it is an entirely different proposition, with its modern feel and bright white facade. Inside, however - as if in a bid to keep up with the Joneses - the state sector has brought its education A-game to the table: as well as the City of Edinburgh Music School, which has 60 students, Broughton also specialises in dance and football.

Yet Tudor Morris, director of the music school, worries that if instrumental music tuition continues to be eroded in Scottish state schools, through the ramping up of fees and cuts to staff, music will once again become the preserve of the elite - something that is practised only by pupils in schools like the one across the road.

Just as some instruments are becoming “extinct” - because they are more expensive to offer - some “voices” will never be heard, he says. He describes the prospect as “chilling”, adding: “And this will be due to their background, rather than talent. From my perspective, this is not emotionally overdramatic. It is what I and colleagues are seeing on a day-to-day basis.”

Morris is not alone in fearing for the future. It seems that hardly a week goes by without a high-profile Scottish figure in the music industry speaking out about the dire straits instrumental tuition finds itself in.

Last month, film composer Patrick Doyle used his 65th birthday celebrations to highlight how vital school lessons had been for him as one of 13 children growing up in a North Lanarkshire family.

World-renowned violinist Nicola Benedetti has hit out over tuition fee rises across the UK, signing a joint letter with other musicians calling for all primary pupils to be taught an instrument at no cost.

And Mick Cooke, a former member of the indie band Belle and Sebastian, also spoke out, saying that he and other musicians such as K T Tunstall, Ricky Ross and Eddi Reader had all benefited from free lessons.

Instrumental music tuition, however, still finds itself in the firing line at this time of year as councils prepare their annual budgets - “along with buses and breakfast clubs”, as one campaigner recently put it, reflecting the widely held view that some things are always vulnerable to cuts. In the case of music, this is partly because instrumental tuition is discretionary, and separate to the music curriculum delivered in schools.

Last week, Midlothian Council demonstrated just how endangered provision is when it put forward plans to scrap instrumental music tuition altogether (bit.ly/MidlothianMusic). On Tuesday, it will decide whether children will continue to have the opportunity to pay to learn an instrument.

Such stark choices are likely to become more common, with councils facing “increasingly critical” holes in their budgets, as a report by public spending watchdog the Accounts Commission put it last year. The report states that the Scottish government cut its funding for local authorities by 9.6 per cent in real terms between 2010-11 and 2018-19, leading to “major challenges” in maintaining services.

Councils themselves are warning - based on the figures in December’s draft Budget - that cuts to crucial services are now “unavoidable”.

The scale of the problem

Such is the perceived threat to instrumental tuition that the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee launched an inquiry last year. Its report was published in January (see box, page 22), and a piece of research into youth music provision more generally is also due to be released early this year.

Committee convener Clare Adamson has had recent experience of the service through her son, who benefited from instrumental music tuition in school and is now studying commercial music at the University of the West of Scotland.

She was struck during the inquiry, she says, by the disparity in provision and fees across councils, as well as the evidence suggesting that there may be a shortage of music tutors in the future as the pipeline dries up - overall instrumental music service numbers fell for the first time last year, by around 2 per cent.

According to Adamson, the committee’s main goal was to lay bare the challenges facing instrumental music tuition in Scotland. Ultimately, its report calls for music tuition in schools to be provided free of charge.

Adamson feels there are lessons to be learned from the Scottish government’s Youth Music Initiative (YMI), which aims to strengthen youth music and offers a year of free tuition to every child by the time they leave primary. This is a Scottish government programme delivered by local authorities, and she believes it could be used as a blueprint for ensuring more equitable access to instrumental music tuition more generally.

“Councils are keen to keep their autonomy and decision-making on these issues, and don’t want ring-fencing,” Adamson says. “However, the evidence showed YMI is very successful and highly regarded … and something we would be keen to see more of.”

Of course, it is not all doom and gloom. There are still places where talent is being recognised, nurtured and supported, and the City of Edinburgh Music School is one of them. It was set up in 1975 and has about 20 primary-aged pupils - based in the Flora Stevenson Primary, a short walk away from Broughton - and roughly 40 secondary pupils. The concept was always that the music school would be part of a mainstream comprehensive, and there are three others in Scotland: Douglas Academy in Milngavie, East Dunbartonshire; Dyce Academy in Aberdeen; and Plockton High in Highland. However, the Edinburgh school is the only one with a primary department.

At Broughton, the school’s music department and the music school are housed in the same block, and share some staff, but operate as two separate entities. The music school has 25 practice rooms, two ensemble rooms, a performance area and a recording studio.

All the practice rooms have glass panels in the doors, so when you meander down the school’s corridors, you witness first-hand the hard work and dedication of the pupils here. As Morris and I do so, we catch glimpses of pupils working with their tutors or independently playing the drums, the guitar, the piano and the cello.

Morris has been head here for 25 years and was previously director of music at the Brit School in London, which is supported by the record industry and has numerous famous alumni, including Adele and Amy Winehouse.

Morris says some instruments are in danger of extinction because they are harder to teach - such as the double bass, the French horn, the trombone and the viola. But all of these are represented here, with each pupil studying piano as well as an ensemble instrument.

Tutors are employed based on the needs of the students in the school at that time. So Phillip Thorne - Morris’s hero, a former music teacher and retired guitar lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland - is teaching S4 pupil Dominic Markus guitar. And former Proclaimers drummer Keith Burns is tutoring S5 pupil Ruairi Logan as he drums along to the 1982 rock standard Rosanna by Toto.

Approximately 30 tutors like these are working in the school, and all the lessons they deliver are free for the students.

This stands in stark contrast to the lived experience of many state-school students who have an interest in pursuing music. The most recent report on instrumental music tuition by the Improvement Service - a national body for local government in Scotland - states that, while a number of authorities allow individual instruction, “lessons tend to be taught in small groups”.

It finds that the average group across Scotland comprises five pupils, but that groups can be as large as 32 in cases when whole classes are taught together. It adds that just five councils in Scotland still deliver an entirely free service.

This school year, four councils where tuition had previously been free introduced fees, while 38 per cent of councils raised their tuition fees, the report notes.

One of the authorities to introduce a charge this year is West Lothian Council, which hit the headlines in November after one of the education committee’s evidence sessions revealed student numbers had since dropped by 65 per cent.

West Lothian families are now asked to pay £354 a year. More up-to-date figures obtained by Tes Scotland show that the drop-off in participation remains around two-thirds - 756 pupils had opted to continue with lessons in December of last year, compared with the 2,065 students taking part in instrumental music in December 2017. However, the service had a large number of registrations this school year: 569 new pupils signed up, and the council says “it is fully expected that, through time, student numbers will gradually increase”.

But what is unclear is who is participating, and who has been pushed out.

Voices silenced

There are concessions in West Lothian for pupils from low-income backgrounds - as there are in all Scottish councils that charge fees - and a council spokesman tells Tes Scotland that the number of instrumental music instruction students from low-income families (measured by receipt of free school meals) has remained broadly unchanged, at 10.6 per cent in December 2017 and 10.7 per cent in December 2018.

However, working families who do not qualify for free meals but have no spare cash in the family budget for lessons are missing out, says a local tutor.

The tutor, who does not wish to be named, explains: “With music tuition, demand is always greater than supply. So, no matter how many drop off, you will always find a huge number who want to take it up. But in some areas of West Lothian, uptake has been completely decimated, and these areas tend to be the disadvantaged areas. It does raise issues about equity and fairness, because people with money are continuing to get all the services.”

Across Scotland, the average fee for tuition is now £234.76 - an increase of just over 10 per cent on last year, and an increase of 47 per cent on 2012-13 when the Improvement Service began reporting on instrumental music tuition.

Clackmannanshire increased fees this year by 103 per cent and now has one of the most expensive instrumental music tuition services in Scotland, with families paying £524 per year for group lessons (see figures, page 19).

The Edinburgh music school has had its own taste of the pressure tight budgets are placing on local authorities. In 2017, the council put forward a proposal that the specialist tuition and facilities on offer at Broughton should be dispersed across the city, in a bid to save £363,000.

Parent Lindsay Law, who led the campaign against the 2017 proposal and has two daughters at the school, likens this to seeing a successful hospital that is achieving impressive results, then deciding to divide it into several smaller services.

It was a stressful time, recalls S6 student Hannah Morrison, one of a number of pupil protesters who took their instruments to the council chambers and played outside the room as councillors made their decision about the school’s future.

She joined the school in P5. Failure to secure a place could well have led to a clean break with music, because her parents were finding lessons increasingly unaffordable. Instead, next year she will be studying violin and composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

For Ruairi, arriving at the music school was a shock to the system. He could play the drums but had to learn the piano from scratch, and he had studied very little music theory. He describes the experience as “really intense”, a “massive step up” and humbling.

Morris explains that coming to a specialist school is challenging for many pupils at first because - while they may have been top of the class for music in their old schools - they quickly realise there are “other amazing students out there”. However, he argues that “the advantage of mixing with other gifted and talented students pushes the pupils here further”.

Ruairi, who has spina bifida and is in a wheelchair, says he hated primary school but is in no rush to leave the music school. “I can sit in a classroom but I struggle after 15 minutes sitting with a pencil - I can’t really do it,” he explains. “Developing as a musician speaks to me. It’s a different outlook on learning. You slowly progress in your knowledge.”

Instrumental to wider learning

The fringe benefits of learning music, such as the ability to work independently and apply yourself, often go unrecognised, according to those fighting to retain services. It also opens up all sorts of opportunities to socialise and work with others to make music, they argue. And then there is the confidence that performing gives you: the largest crowd Burns ever played to was at Glastonbury, the world-famous festival in Somerset.

In the music school’s primary, I meet P7 Andy Wong, who agrees to play us some Bach. Andy is autistic and, when he arrived at the school, he needed one-on-one support. But 18 months later, he was playing in the orchestra, the fiddle group and the samba band.

“How he is coming out of his shell as an individual is quite astonishing,” says the music school’s assistant director, Susan Emslie. “He has responded really well to the one-on-one tuition and is responding increasingly well to being in group situations with his peers.”

Parent campaigner Lindsay Law’s daughter, Josie, is in for one of her practice periods, and talks about the discipline learning music has taught her. She has to be organised, she points out, in order to fit everything in. She also mentions her bafflement when music is discussed as if it were “just a little thing, just music”.

This year, there is no mention of the music school in Edinburgh’s budget plans, and the city has retained a free instrumental music service to date. It is likely, however, that the instrumental music services in some areas will take a hit, as authorities struggle to balance the books.

Some think the solution is a national service - akin to the proposals on the table in Wales (see box, page 21). Others argue that the government should put a cap on the fees authorities can charge for instrumental music tuition, or that it should simply be available free of charge to all children attending state schools in Scotland.

The education committee inquiry heard that access to instrumental music tuition was “inequitable”, but that £4 million of new money and collegiate working between local authorities and the government would “sort it”.

Campaigners, however, have rallied behind a plea to “stop the bleeding” and address the critical condition of instrumental music. And all want an urgent resolution to - as one music teacher writing in Tes Scotland put it last year - the “shambolic lottery of charges on parents for their children’s lessons”.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 8 February 2019 issue under the headline “Exit music”