Introduction
In this article, I explore the ways that early childhood music education in the UK has been subject to market forces through the expansion of both private provision for music (what I term the ‘branded product’) and short-term projects funded by external organisations, usually charities (the ‘funded project’). I consider, with reference to both types of provision, how economic thinking has shaped the ways that early childhood music is viewed and how it has developed in recent years. Broadly speaking, these two modes of provision are connected by the insertion of economic rationales of investment and return into early childhood music education practices. This economic rationality is, in turn, driven by the prevailing and dominant neoliberal discourse and principles (Harvey, Reference HARVEY2005).
As I will argue, economic rationales shift perceptions of the nature and purposes of music education. The crux of my argument is that allowing early childhood music education to be subject to the logic of markets has introduced new roles, new discourses and new practices (as I will explain as the article unfolds). But it has, at the same time, introduced new values and priorities that have changed the meaning and purpose of music education for young children. These changes have resulted in a transformed, but, as I will argue, impoverished pedagogy. Moreover, both forms of provision have become so prevalent and familiar that their models of practice and pedagogies have come to be taken for granted. My aim is to reveal the political and ideological processes at work beneath the surface in these two forms of provision in order to challenge what have become assumed ways of working and to stimulate more critical analysis. I will argue that acceptance of the all-encompassing economic narrative occludes crucial questions as to purpose, value and social justice.
The insertion of market rationales into early childhood music is more straightforward and obvious in the private group session, usually paid for directly by parents, than in the funded project. Clearly, the private sessions need, at the very least, to attract purchasers, to create sufficient remuneration for the music provider and to cover expenses. For funded projects, the operation of market forces and their economic outcomes is more complex, embedded and tied to policy. The careful costing and specification of objectives that must accompany a funding application are the most obvious economic dimensions. The project must guarantee value for money and produce measurable outcomes commensurate with the finance invested by the donor. However, in projects, there is also a longer term economic investment that is related to a policy view of children as human capital (Becker, Reference BECKER2013; Campbell-Barr & Nygård, Reference CAMPBELL-BARR and NYGÅRD2014). Economic rationality translated into intervention in young children’s lives has become an accepted principle in such projects. Since a conception of children as human capital is more complex to explain, I will return to it later when I discuss the process that I term ‘projectisation’. Thus economic logic, with outcomes measurable in economic terms, drives both types of provision, the funded project and the branded product.
This article is based on my long-term experience of the early childhood music sector in the UK. However, I anticipate that the arguments will broadly relate to practices in other countries, particularly those that have been subject to neoliberal policies in education. The two types of early childhood music provision that are my focus, project and product, operate in different arenas and as such there may seem to be much that differentiates them. Indeed, I will discuss each type of provision separately in order to explain and examine how they operate. But my priority in this article is the market narrative that unites them and how this has impacted on the nature of pedagogy. The experience from which I draw has included direct involvement in many projects managed and funded by different organisations, and many observations of private practice. In preparing this article, I read sources of relevant information available via Internet searches, for example, project reports and descriptions and promotional information from private practice. I have also taken a lead from the active body of literature that is exploring the transformation of education through marketisation. The majority of this literature focuses on mainstream education (e.g., Ward, Reference WARD2012) but also includes a few texts that are specific to the early childhood sector (e.g., Penn, Reference PENN, Lloyd and Penn2012; Moss, Reference MOSS2014). My aim has been to translate theoretical thinking from this growing body of critical literature into the early childhood music sector in order to develop the discussion that follows.
Context
In recent years, early childhood music provision in the UK, as in many countries, has expanded rapidly to become a distinctive field of practice, taking place in a separate sector largely under the radar of mainstream, school-based music education. The absence of any state funding for the early childhood music sector leaves a gaping hole that has been filled, quite rapidly, by many new players such as private entrepreneurs, charitable organisations and community arts providers. The overall result is a very uneven and highly fragmented distribution of types and forms of early childhood music education. This distribution is related to local needs and interests, and to the serendipity of local organisations, businesses and enterprising individuals.
The logic of neoliberalism
In the UK, under a neoliberal regime, it is accepted that the state promotes the commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of institutions that hold power to shape practices according to this market narrative (Harvey, Reference HARVEY2005; Reference HARVEY2006). The logic of neoliberalism monetises and commodifies every aspect of our lives, making everything subject to its exchange value (also, Brown, Reference BROWN2015). In addition, what has to occur is a simultaneous process of rebuilding mental conceptions of the world to favour neoliberal principles (ibid). This requires the production of new needs and desires so that commodification extends beyond the usual boundaries of market products. As Harvey has explained, neoliberal policies and economic programmes have a symbiotic relationship with the rhetorical and discursive means by which the aims and principles become naturalised and accepted (Harvey, Reference HARVEY2006). This produces the ‘construction of consent’ as he terms it, by which individuals are persuaded to adopt and embrace neoliberal policies and programmes (Harvey, Reference HARVEY2005, p. 39). A key point here is that these values and norms come to be accepted as the status quo. This acceptance closes down scrutiny and critique and severely restricts the imagination for alternatives. Although neoliberal processes in education are thought to raise accountability, responsiveness, efficiency and quality, many education scholars have launched devastating critiques of marketisation exposing its serious limitations and the threats it poses (see Moss, Reference MOSS2014; Penn, Reference PENN, Lloyd and Penn2012).
Sandel, a political philosopher from the US, argues that neoliberal societies have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society (Reference SANDEL2012). Sandel’s work has been criticised for attempting to encompass diverse examples within broad-brush ideas (e.g., Palmer, Reference PALMER2012). In other words, he has a tendency to offer simplified explanations for complex philosophical issues. Nevertheless, he provides a useful lens through which to view the current predicament for early childhood music. Sandel places emphasis on the value dimension of relying on the market to deliver something which used to, or should be, conceived as a public service – namely, in this case, education. He suggests that this reliance is of concern for two major reasons. The first is equality. The more that money can buy, the more being affluent enough matters. The second is that market thinking changes the meaning of practices and crowds out attitudes and norms worth caring about. Critique of a market society is therefore about more than inequality and fairness; it is about what he calls the ‘corrosive tendency’ of markets (ibid, p. 9). Putting a price on things can corrupt them because ‘markets don’t only allocate goods, they also express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged’ (ibid, p. 9). So although market rationales and mechanisms are assumed to be neutral, inert and not to change the value or meaning of the items being exchanged, they do, in fact, leave their mark. They undermine values worth caring about. This, according to Sandel, becomes a moral and political issue, not a merely economic one.
In the next two sections, I describe both types of provision in more detail, pointing out the operation of market forces and revealing how this has rearticulated the visions, values and purposes of early childhood music education and taken over its language and pedagogy.
Projectisation
Funded projects with economic aims and discourses have permeated the public sector in the UK, including early childhood music education. Across the UK music projects set up by local, enterprising organisations focus on discrete activities with little or no connection, collaboration or learning between them. Projects are not initiated within an overarching strategic policy framework that could provide sustained funding and planning on a regional or national scale. The result is a series of stand-alone projects, each lasting for a finite time span and focused on isolated aims. Projects are temporary; assembled for a short period of time and then dismantled. There is the idea that projects are exploratory and then can be scaled up once evidence of ‘what works’ has accumulated, but in reality, this consolidation and expansion rarely happens.
Human capital theory
Having flagged human capital thinking as embedded in the economic rationale that underpins funded projects earlier in the article, I return to it here. In this policy view, early childhood education makes a central contribution as a creator of human capital that not only benefits children’s well-being, social and intellectual capacities in the short term but also in the long term by creating a viable and flexible workforce that will generate macroeconomic returns (Becker, Reference BECKER2013; Buzzelli, Reference BUZZELLI, Lightfoot-Rueda and Peach2015; Campbell-Barr & Nygård, Reference CAMPBELL-BARR and NYGÅRD2014). A view of early childhood music as human capital investment thus includes a number of implicit expectations as to how young children are expected to benefit from the (musical) inputs and, longer term, to contribute to the national economy. These include individual cognitive, social gains; longer term education and employment gains; national, social security benefits in terms of a more equal and employable population; and investment in a knowledge economy required for national economic advancement (Campbell-Barr & Nygård, Reference CAMPBELL-BARR and NYGÅRD2014). There is an implicit, deterministic assumption that correct techniques applied at the correct moment early in a child’s life, as an intervention, can have multiple future benefits both for children individually and for society (see Bruer, Reference BRUER2011; Gillies, Edwards & Horsley, Reference GILLIES, EDWARDS and HORSLEY2017). The project therefore must promise future returns on strategic investment in the present.
For early childhood, music ‘projectisation’ has, therefore, resulted in the privileging of a particular view of musical activity as bringing about longer term gains. This, in turn, has had a distinctive influence on pedagogy. Music per se has little contribution to offer to an image of children within human capital theory; its value lies in its enhancement of other attributes. The dominance of human capital theory results in a specific image of music in childhood in which music is narrowly conceived in instrumental terms. Other contributions to a child’s quality of life in the here and now, such as enjoyment, expressivity, creativity, imagination, empathy for others, moral values and even the longer term core aspect of musical learning in and of itself may be dismissed. They are dismissed because they are viewed as of lesser importance and thus unrealistic in a market-driven society. Here, we can clearly see the operation of, as Sandel would say (Reference SANDEL2012), the ‘corrosive’ effect of markets in drastically reducing the value of certain types of learning at the expense of others.
Thus, human capital thinking biases projects towards means-end, interventionist aims. In a neoliberal policy context, these aims provide a strong, legitimating basis for certain types of music activities (see also Baker, Reference BAKER2016). They promise measurable and accountable returns on investment (cf. Gillies, Edwards & Horsley, Reference GILLIES, EDWARDS and HORSLEY2017). Interventions tend to adopt a common frame of circulating ‘problems’ focused on supposed deficiencies in target populations. Currently, these problems among young children typically include communication difficulties, language delay, insensitive parenting and troubled family relationships (ibid). The projects usually aim to work with parents and children in ‘areas of deprivation’ where these problems are assumed to be endemic (ibid). These apparent problems arise from deficit assumptions about families in terms of their attitude or lack of knowledge and awareness. There is no acknowledgement of the wider structural social issues such as poverty and lack of welfare services that increase stress levels and negatively impact on the quality of life for young children and families (ibid). Equally, they are rarely focused on the likely professional development needs of the project musicians to enact this demanding work appropriately or query the pedagogical process and its aims (Arculus, Reference ARCULUS2019).
Managerialism
In keeping with the neoliberal environment, a managerial, technocratic approach has come to characterise project discourse and techniques (see Arculus, Reference ARCULUS2019). Projectisation relies on the creation of a common discourse and shared techniques that control and regulate the design of early childhood music projects. These discourses re-form the objects about which they speak. The project design, how it is enacted and the subjectivity of those who participate, is organised through this discourse and its techniques (Arculus, Reference ARCULUS2019). All these aspects are then made visible and audible in the projects as they take place. By these means, the process becomes a self-perpetuating, self-validating, enclosed circuit. Those who control the grants and award the funding restrict the direction the music work may take and what research or evaluation can be carried out within the project. Here, we see Harvey’s ‘construction of consent’ in action (Harvey, Reference HARVEY2005, p. 39), whereby a series of rhetorical moves (which slowly shift over time but nevertheless remain on a consistent pathway) are aligned with compelling progressive ideas about music interventions for young children that (so the discourse claims) have the potential to ‘transform lives’ and overcome disadvantage.
While it is fair to say that funders vary considerably in the level of freedom they provide to grant applicants, the tendency on the part of funders is increasingly to steer or even commission projects within a framework of priorities and aims that they determine (Ball & Junemann, Reference BALL and JUNEMANN2012). Project applicants have little choice but to design their proposed projects within these frameworks and declare the outcomes which they intend to ‘target’. Specifying outcomes rigorously in advance conforms to rational economist thinking of ‘smart investments’. It reduces the investment risk for the funder but also reduces the freedom for grant recipients and, most significantly, for the participants. While innovation is ostensibly a requirement for project design, the pre-specification and risk-aversion result, in reality, in less adventurous approaches to working. The project applicants are often in a double bind, attempting to propose low-risk work that has a high chance of successfully and predictably meeting predefined outcomes and successfully win the funding, while at the same time creating an impression of innovation that meets new priorities. These funding mechanisms, therefore, inhibit the design of exploratory and developmental approaches to practice. Certain tried and tested formulaic approaches tend to be recycled with little real advancement.
Project-based pedagogies and practices, therefore, are legitimated on the basis of predetermined aims and outcomes strongly steered by the funders and driven by the interventionist aims of the work. More seriously this shift to rigid, predesigned project structures severely curtails the right of the project participants to define their own goals and activities. It is assumed that others know what is in their best interests. Funders and project planners may pay lip service to the principle of sharing power with the families, children and early childhood workers who participate in the music activity, but prespecified project design rarely accommodates it.
Project pedagogy
‘Projectisation’ influences musical pedagogy in distinctive ways. First, as emphasised, the project pedagogy is designed to meet a number of prespecified goals that represent a key change – or changes – by a certain date, often defined as ‘impact’ (see Youth Music, undated). It is assumed that the project team already knows how to achieve the desired outcomes through the pedagogy they adopt. Working from that assumption, the project is planned and executed. Once set in motion, it can be difficult to pivot and change the processes and certainly not to change course from the project’s planned direction and endpoint. There may be certain problems – or indeed interesting, unanticipated opportunities – that arise within a project, as would be expected in any practical, artistic music work, but they are unlikely to receive attention if they fall outside the project brief or stated outcomes. The outcomes approach embedded in projects thus focuses all attention on achieving the endpoint but drains time, resources and attention away from the process. Project time spans have become noticeably truncated over the years. Projects that I worked with 10 or 15 years ago would typically stretch over a year at minimum, often 2 or 3 years, in the same early childhood settings with the same children. Now, the typical project ‘delivers’ a short phase of approximately 10 drop-in sessions to a group of children on whistle-stop tours around several settings to reach as many children as possible. The typical 10 sessions is an extremely short period of time to even get to know and establish working patterns with young children let alone achieve any kind of development or positive change. Thus, adding to a point I have already made, any opportunity for developmental music work that explores process in depth, or responsiveness to the unexpected, is severely curtailed and only the endpoint, arriving at the prespecified outcomes, really matters. It is, in this way, that ‘economisation’ by reducing musical input to simply a means-end hollows out the pedagogical process and restricts its scope and vision.
Within the projects, the various governing techniques, such as constant reporting, the need for accounting and for evaluation, contribute to the distraction from the pedagogical process. The outcomes-driven project plan results in rigid control over what is evaluated. Features that lend themselves to quantifiable measurement tend to assume greater importance. Hence, the most basic counting of how many sessions and attendees is often given headline status in evaluation (see, for example, Youth Music undated). Clearly, simple numbers say nothing about the nature and quality of the children’s musical experiences. Thus, the subtler aspects of experience – those aspects that are meaningful and informative but are much less amenable to quantitative measurement – are overlooked. The preference on the part of funders for hard data to demonstrate the headline impact statements also leads to a number of weak procedures in research terms. There is a tendency to attribute cause and effect, or at least to imply it, where there is insubstantial evidence to warrant such claims. Data collection and research processes that require expertise if they are to be reliable and rigorous are often handed over to practitioners untrained in research procedures. Observations collected for educational purposes may be subject to forms of analysis and accorded a status as reliable data for which they were not intended or can support. Weak research processes lead to exaggerated claims to gains and distorted perceptions of what can be achieved from what are often very small inputs. It would seem that all this results in an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ situation where everyone tacitly knows that the evaluation is being ‘talked up’ but since future funding, and livelihoods depend on reporting success, this exaggeration is condoned (see also Logan, Reference LOGAN2015). Indeed, since many evaluators depend on repeat contracts, they have powerful incentives to acquiesce in self-censorship. Evaluation findings that do point to problems are silenced or softened or attributed to factors outside the control of the project team, such as scheduling, resources, suitability of premises, or the lack of interest and involvement on the part of parents or staff.
Due to weak evaluation, important learning is not being made. Moreover, any lessons that may emerge from evaluations often do not feed back into priority setting or refinements to pedagogy and practice. There is also little evidence that evaluations are collated or subject to meta-review in order to provide a repository of knowledge and inform strategic planning. Thus, there appears to be little interest in incremental learning from the past to improve and enrich practice.
Innovation
A key characteristic of projectisation, in keeping with neoliberal values, is the continual need for innovation. The result is a constant search on the part of project applicants for what, in the eyes of funders, is the latest priority that should be ‘targeted’. Key players in the project world avidly attend meetings and conference days in order to network and tune in to the latest discourse (see Ball & Junemann, Reference BALL and JUNEMANN2012). Keeping abreast of the contemporary discourse is essential to secure their own working futures and that of their organisation. Priorities are often reduced to simple, circulating buzzwords such as ‘progression’, ‘quality’, ‘impact’ or ‘inclusion’. These become nodal words in which managerial and professional worlds intersect and are articulated around technocratic mechanisms, such as fixed application templates and quality frameworks. The concepts are rarely explored in depth, nor their underlying values articulated. This kind of rhetoric feeds forward. It is reproduced in documents, presentations, web pages and Twitter exchanges and takes on a form a reality. These vocabularies shape how the project world communicates within itself and how it coalesces, marks out and sustains a distinctive form of rationality.
We can see, therefore, how projectisation requires and creates new forms of knowledge and expertise, new techniques and tools (framework documents; funding bids; evaluation; report writing) and new roles for those conversant with these knowledges and tools. Those with this expertise gain advantage and can exercise power in the enactment and continuation of funded projects within a neoliberal market environment. Frequently, those who possess this technocratic expertise have no authentic hands-on experience of the early childhood music field they are charged with managing. They rely on others for information and advice and build a narrow set of relationships they trust for information exchange, forming a governance elite connected through informal and formal networks (see Ball & Junemann [2012] for descriptions of governance in education). The project managers make decisions based on what they pick up from meetings where the circulating, current discourse is crystallised and perpetuated. At best, as some do, they recognise their lack of real-world expertise and seek out the professionals who can provide the knowledge they do not possess and work collaboratively. At worst, they remain distant and disconnected.
The elevation and consolidation of this technocratic knowledge and expertise devalues practice-derived skills and knowledge and, as a result, sidelines early childhood music professionals. Many early childhood music practitioners and academics feel frustrated that their skills and expertise are marginalised, devalued and even undermined (see Crouch, Reference CROUCH2016:112 for a discussion of how the neoliberal approach elevates technocratic managerialism and undermines professional knowledge in education). The transformation of early childhood music education into economically driven markets and projects has been mirrored by a need to co-opt the early years music educator, academic or practitioner, and to transform their identity to fit into this neoliberal project world (Arculus, Reference ARCULUS2019). At the same time, it must be said, there are many musicians and academics who find self-advantage in conforming to the economised rhetoric and practices of early childhood music. Indeed, I understand that in order to make a living as an early childhood music educator within the limited professional choices available, compromise and conformity may be a financial necessity. Because this rhetoric has come to dominate, however, democratic debate is avoided and alternative viewpoints that challenge and critique are not being heard.
In this next section, I discuss the private early childhood music sector: the branded product.
Privatisation
In the absence of state funding for early childhood music, an extensive private market has become established in recent years in the UK. There are no accurate figures, but the 1,000 plus membership of a social media site dedicated to early childhood music centring on the UK suggests that a very high proportion of the early childhood music sector is provided by private businesses. Many businesses are set up by individuals, running a few classes in their immediate locality, but there are also franchised businesses that operate nationally on a larger scale. Privatised early childhood music is thus subject to the logic of commodification and consumerism and this has profoundly influenced the development of very specific types of pedagogy.
Clearly, private businesses operate as a commercial activity rather than an educational service. They offer a commodified version of early childhood music for sale within a competitive market. They trade their commodities to individual consumers: to parents and increasingly to privately run nurseries. The product is continually assessed as to whether it meets customers’ needs and is providing the value they seek. So there is a process of continuous, but small, modification of the product’s features. In contrast to the façade of innovation, the short-termism and endpoint/outcome focus of projects, the early childhood music product presents itself as established, traditional and enduring. Typically, websites declare the length of time that a class or franchise has been running because durability attests to the market success of the product.
A market model is built upon the exchange relationship between individual purchasers (parent or private nursery) and private, commercial providers (individuals or franchised businesses). Both purchasers and providers are assumed to be putting self-interests to the fore: parents by seeking out the best music provision for their child and their situation, and providers by seeking maximum income. The process is assumed to be self-regulatory. The quantity of classes in any one area, the prices and the nature of the sessions will reflect demand. Consumer choice and competition, it is assumed, will ensure that any unsatisfactory providers will be squeezed out of the market. The expected outcome from a marketised sector is that it offers a high degree of diversity, reflecting differing preferences and provides quality and cost-effective provision. This is not the reality, however.
In an education market, power shifts away from the producers to the consumers. A core assumption on which the market is premised is that purchasers can make well-informed decisions about the product they purchase. However, not all purchasers, including managers of early childhood settings, have the necessary expert knowledge that enables them to assess the suitability and quality of the early childhood music on offer. Moreover, the marketing muscle of larger franchises can exert a powerful influence on choice.
Marketisation means that music businesses must vie with one another to attract customers. The private sector has generated a range of approaches that aim to appeal to customers and to make their product stand out from its competitors. In an age of accountability and always needing to identify value for money, the promotional material must spell out how and why the sessions will be desirable to parents. Branding is key. Branding highlights what makes one offer more desirable to purchasers than others. The promotion typically presents future-oriented gains for children that are easily identifiable and of value to the middle classes who are the target purchasers. A browse of various websites reveals a number of different market ploys. Some may seek to affirm the substance, the content of the programme by referring to well-established approaches such as Kodály or Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Others may appeal to musical elitism with names, such as MiniMozarts and promises that children will advance their musical skills. Others will make a broad appeal to a wide range of parents by emphasising fun and friendliness symbolised through soft toy characters, such as Jo Jingles and other gimmicks. Others will appeal to the wider educational gains and preparation for school, particularly if they also hope to win a share of the general early childhood education market. The various commodified forms of music pedagogy must be further endowed with symbolic significance through website endorsements in the form of enthusiastic parental statements or validations from scientific research. Importantly, the appeals are being directed towards the parents’ desires and must fit their image of childhood and parenting culture. Thus, what is developmentally and educationally in the best interests of babies and young children is rarely the priority. I will return to this important point in the conclusion and draw connections with project pedagogy.
While branding distinctiveness leads to variety and choice, it also reduces the possibilities for raising standards through collaboration with peer practitioners, ideas-sharing and reflections on different approaches to pedagogy. Businesses protect their product against competitors who may wish to steal information about their methods, approaches and materials and encroach on their custom. Therefore, one of the main consequences is that individualised, distinctive approaches proliferate and competition dominates at the expense of collectively raising standards of practice. Pedagogy and practice are not being shaped by collective explorations of core values, nor by attempts to arrive at a consensus of good and appropriate practice.
Moreover, the reality is that the cost of private classes excludes many parents for whom they are simply not affordable. Middle-class parents have the resources (money and transport) to be able to access sessions and shop around. Thus, the private early childhood music sector has developed disproportionally in areas where they are most likely to attract a healthy and profitable attendance, namely middle-class suburbs. The result is varied availability in affluent urban areas and scarce provision in disadvantaged urban and remote rural areas. Unlike public services which aim to provide a consistent service whatever the vagaries of the market or the vulnerabilities of the clientele, the private market responds primarily to profit and loss. Commercialism erodes commonality. Serving poor or vulnerable children is not a primary consideration. The privatised market of early childhood music is therefore highly selective and inequitable and contributes to the reproduction of social class inequalities, just as Sandel (Reference SANDEL2012) points out. Thus, social divisions are exacerbated, not diminished in what has become a two-tier system. Poor families receive the imposed, short-term, interventionist pedagogy of the funded project and affluent families can opt for the commodified pedagogy of the branded product.
Entrepreneurship and identity
Valuing entrepreneurship is a corollary of neoliberalism (see Moore, Reference MOORE2016). The professional activity of music workers in both models requires the development of multiple musical and non-musical skills to conform to the demands the gig economy that both the project and product worlds impose. The musicians have to create and maintain their own opportunities, seek funding, find purchasers, manage schedules and constantly juggle music education and financial priorities (ibid). Income in this career is not guaranteed. Income is low and likely to fluctuate with little security and no access to benefits. On the positive side, entrepreneurship has created a range of diverse roles. For the energetic, entrepreneurial early childhood music educator who is capable and adaptable, there can be some interesting portfolio careers.
As I pointed out earlier in the article, an additional layer of managerial, administrative roles has emerged that deal with organisation, administration, collecting data, analysing and reporting (cf. Ball & Junemann, Reference BALL and JUNEMANN2012). Indeed the private sector, particularly franchises, has generated a similar raft of managerial roles. A substantial portion of the finance is taken up by these middle management and evaluator roles, particularly in funded projects, taking away resources from the actual interface between children and music. Thus, it would seem that employed administrative roles for middle-class professionals are typically assured within organisations, including the franchise businesses, while those providing the actual work remain in freelance, low pay, precarious positions (Arculus, Reference ARCULUS2019).
However, entrepreneurship also changes the identities of early childhood music educators because they are heavily prescribed by the governing agents, whether those agents are funders, managers, parents or franchisers. The music educators must foster particular types of enterprising subjectivities in a culture of competition and self-promotion. They must become ‘experts’ of themselves, apparently self-defining, yet in reality, tightly tied to and acquiescing to the dominant narratives of market competition and valuation. Individuals must conform to this environment in order to secure future work, but this must seem to be achieved through their own choice and free will, as entrepreneurs rather than through control or coercion. The operation of market forces thus threatens their professional integrity. While maintaining an enterprising subjectivity and conforming to the demands of commodification or projectisation, the exercise of educational and musical professional judgement, indeed even moral judgements, can be severely constrained. Market forces encourage music educators to give funders and parents what they dictate or desire, rather than prioritise and develop what they (the music educators) think is in the best interests of the children and their musical learning. In this way, they lose professional control over the pedagogical process and models of practice. Yet, at all times, the music educators must conform and present a persona of ‘can do’ positivity, energy and enthusiasm. In this environment, boasting of successes and ‘talking up’ work become required characteristics, both for individuals and organisations. Music workers may feel pressured to present controlled, stylised displays of positive emotion (both in person and on social media) appropriate to a service role rather than a professional role (Hochschild, Reference HOCHSCHILD1983). There is little room for tentativeness or the honest appraisal of dilemmas, challenges and difficulties. Social media has become a vital tool in this process of creating a public presence and image of success.
The overall influence on pedagogy
The overall argument I am constructing in this article is that early childhood music education has been transformed by neoliberalism and its market logics. We now have a patchwork of competing organisations in which individuals and small organisations are focused, by necessity, on individual advantage and their own self-interest. Economic rationales are what shape practices and pedagogy, not what is in the children’s or family’s, or indeed society’s, best interests. Moreover, the individuals and organisations do not, collectively, take actions or participate in actions which, democratically, serve the public good. Marketisation and privatisation consolidate and – even worse – serve to widen inequalities of access to music education provision. They also promote distinct differences and variation between provider types that are detrimental to its quality rather than work towards collective understandings of good practice based on carefully considered values and priorities.
In both models of practice, certain ideals have become embodied in the early childhood music provision which, in reality, narrowly conform to the dispositions and values of middle-class parents whose purchasing power must be courted by the private providers. These include a culture of intensive parenting (Hays, Reference HAYS1996) translated into highly structured and adult-managed pedagogy and a disposition of bodily restraint and discipline that is expected of the children (and indeed participating adults). The models of practice expect to create an atmosphere of controlled fun and stylised excitement. The inbuilt message is of preparation for an adult future; the long-term cultivation by parents of their children as unique, talented and successful individuals. The classes, therefore, produce and reinforce the habitus of contemporary middle-class parenting (also Young, Reference YOUNG2018). Moreover, this model of pedagogy has become so widely distributed and taken-for-granted that it is also incorporated into most project work, particularly since the pedagogical process is assumed and given so little consideration. Oftentimes, freelance music educators are straddling both worlds and import their pedagogical style into project work with little or no adaptation. Moreover, given its interventionist aims, project work is, at core, implicitly seeking to use musical activities as a means to impose the corrective practices of White middle-class parenting onto the (assumed) disadvantaged families (often from working-class or diverse cultural backgrounds) they work with (Gillies, Edwards & Horsley, Reference GILLIES, EDWARDS and HORSLEY2017; Young, Reference YOUNG2018).
Conclusion: a question of values
Is there escape from the all-pervasive and powerful market thinking? As Sandel emphasises (Reference SANDEL2012) a conception of value built on market principles hampers the ability to see beyond an economic rationality of investment and return, to imagine alternatives and to ask what matters most. In order to challenge the uncritical acceptance of market thinking, it will be necessary to revitalise the discourse by returning to questions of purposes and values (also Moss, Reference MOSS2014). Economisation has thinned and impoverished discussion around these questions and sidelined their moral implications. The most powerful voices within the early childhood music sector have become narrowly managerial and technocratic and they have lost their ability to critique the status quo. Management, control and technocratic processes should be replaced by democratic collaboration, power-sharing between all involved and documentation of the pedagogical process and reflection on practice. Imagining alternatives will require a return to an ethical base constructed on values of care, empathy, generosity and dignity. It calls for the true needs and injustices of poverty experienced by many families to be recognised. Behind lightweight and stigmatising expressions of ‘disadvantage’ and ‘vulnerable’ families lie much deeper moral and political questions that are silenced in the technocratic discourse based on a view of young children in human capitalist terms (Campbell-Barr & Nygård, Reference CAMPBELL-BARR and NYGÅRD2014). At the level of ideology, we have to return to conceptions of a just society framed by principles of common good, social justice and equality for all children.
It also needs to be recognised that the dominance of economic arguments – to invest in early childhood music – feeds the very market discourse that is a barrier to the change I hope we seek. Every time the rationale for music is framed around its wider benefits and gains, an argument is being upheld that works against alternative arguments. Some may say that they are adopting this argument as a temporary and pragmatic measure in order to secure funding, but that does nothing to challenge the fundamental market thinking. I acknowledge that when livelihoods depend on securing grants or customers in a freelance working environment and also, thereby, creating more music work for young children, any tactics to secure financing can seem to be justified. It can be tempting when the early childhood field is marginalised to adopt benefits arguments that seem to draw positive attention and create interest. Yet at the same time, when music-as-intervention arguments are adopted, there is an implicit agreement that these are the arguments that matter the most and other arguments are worth less.
To escape the entrenched market thinking and to enrich pedagogy and practices may seem like a difficult undertaking, but I think not. We need to ask the ambitious bigger questions that place young children at the centre. What do all the children in the projects and in the private music sessions need for their here and now and, only then, when that answer is in place ask what they might need for their own futures (Young, Reference YOUNG2018). Heeding Moss (Reference MOSS2014), he asks, what image of the child do we hold and how does that image articulate pedagogy? He turns to the nurseries of Northern Italy in Reggio Emilia to be inspired by an educational approach based on principles of democracy. And the image of children’s present and future should be tied into current predicaments that are society-wide: the state of the environment; the widening social inequalities and the rising numbers of children who live in poverty as a result; increasing diversities and divisiveness. The image should also recognise positive opportunities such as the potentials of new technologies and the socially and artistically enriching potentials of cultural diversity. Answering these questions will need to draw on the knowledge of early childhood professionals and early childhood music educators and academics. Their knowledge and experience should be respected on an equal footing, listened to and freed from imposed controls (Young, Reference YOUNG, Wright, Johansen, Kanellopoulos and Schmidtforthcoming). This shift goes hand-in-hand with a recognition of the field of practice as highly skilled and specialised together with a much wider understanding of what good, rich, child-and-family-sensitive pedagogy looks like and sounds like.
