Today I was supposed to take my son to Rug Rhymes at the Southbank, but I was so jet-lagged from a recent trip to the US that I found myself still in my pyjamas at 2pm – normally a total nightmare for me, but not today! Today, as I was clearing out my emails after reading ‘Frankenstein’ aloud to a transfixed baby (he was as shocked as I was about Justine!), I found the EYFS Key Skills Curriculum my mother had sent me upon my request for an milestones tracker that would add an intellectual wow factor to my baby books. My mother, a former Deputy Head at a school for students with severe and multiple disabilities for fifteen years, just so happens to have this sort of thing hanging around on her hard drive and when she visits, we do things like create Nielsen Boxes for my son, and discuss sensory awareness. I had been meaning to look at these documents for a while, and they provided me with some great opportunities to play with my son and have some big thoughts about the impact of early development on the students that I teach at secondary level. Firstly, we listened to a variety of rhythms – initially with the aim of seeing whether baby would anticipate the next beat in a pattern with any form of body language – but this turned into an exploration of baby’s reaction to djembe, samba, dubstep and meditative pulsing, and later, to me singing along to Paul Simon. Music is incredibly atmospheric, and many teachers and parents use it to either energise or calm their students, or to create a given atmosphere to match a topic or stimuli. Baby definitely responded differently to the samba (concentration) than to the dubstep (frightened!) and I was surprised at how calming the rhythmic beep of a heart rate monitor seemed to be. Wouldn’t this level of calm concentration be great last thing on a Friday, I thought… and then, I thought… Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a real, proper research project into this… and then I did a bit of Googling and discovered Chris Boyd Brewer’s book on this exact topic. Wow! I thought. ‘Alpha brain wave state’, ‘theme oriented units’, ‘multi sensory learning experience’ – this guy has really explored this idea in depth. This is fantastic reading for a teacher interested in building a creative classroom teacher, or a Music teacher looking to develop cross-curricular integration of their subject. Whilst I am a musician, though, I am not a Music teacher, but I am interested in school leadership. Being a Principal one day? Yes, please! Designing the curriculum, culture and ethos of a new academy or free school… Gosh. Exciting times. What got me thinking, therefore, was the story of music education in my own school. As a recent academy takeover from a former ‘inadequate’ school, our focus was – you guessed it – English and Maths, and as such, when our one Music teacher left, we had bigger fish to fry than to employ a new one. As results have improved, however, SLT’s vision for the school has begun to be realised, and we now have a Performing Arts department made up of a Music teacher and a Drama teacher. This is very exciting news for us, and I am so chuffed for our students who have begun to jump at the creative opportunities that are now on offer. A big question that I’ve been mulling over in my pjs today, though – I had to have a shower and wash my hair this afternoon before I could articulate it – was the impact that music education might have on the behaviour and wellbeing of our students. We are a typical inner city school with our share of angry, challenging and unhappy students, and our firm behaviour management policy is the saving grace of our teaching and learning. Babies, as anyone who knows one will know, are the epitome of raw, uninhibited human emotion – when things are bad, they’re really bad; when things are funny, they’re delightfully funny – so if music – the acts of listening, singing, participating, dancing, expressing, banging, wriggling, bopping – can have such a profound effect on a baby’s mood and behaviour, what could be the impact of the regular inclusion of music in the weekly activities of our angry, disenfranchised students who experience similarly raw emotions? In short, can Arts education improve student behaviour, school culture and outcomes in schools like ours who are often pressured to focus on core subjects, like supporters of creative subjects insist that it can? Having spent the last four months singing to my baby, and experimenting today, it’s a clear fact that music makes human beings happier and more emotionally literate, and happier children produce better results, don’t they? To do this research properly would take time and energy, and as a research novice, I’m not sure where I’d start: tracking a group of target students? Analysing behaviour data before and after the introduction of music to the curriculum? Comparing a set of “control” students who did and did not receive a music education? Comparing the cultures of two schools where one offers Music and one does not? How would one even go about proving that the music education was the primary influencer on the attitude and behaviour of otherwise difficult children with so many other factors contributing to that child’s development? It’s a fascinating topic, and one I can’t wait to discuss with our new Head of Music, or the first Lead Practitioner in Music, or Music teacher completing a doctorate that I meet, but for now, the most important impact on my CPD is how I will use music in my classroom upon my return to work, based on Chris Boyd Brewer’s suggestions and my own experimentation with my baby and my students. … and the most important impact outside of my work head? More music, singing, dancing and concerts for baby, of course!