Fife Labour Education spokesperson Kay Morrison has stepped up the campaign to protect instrumental music tuition in Fife schools and will move a motion at Fife Council this week asking councillors to endorse Scotland’s largest teaching union the EIS ‘Charter for Instrumental Music’.
The motion comes on the back of a £400,000 cut in music tuition in the current financial year which has seen 11 posts lost to music instruction and the remaining services being redistributed to favour schools in areas where there is a high incidence of free school meals.
The motion argues that music provision should be made available to all children in all parts of Fife ‘regardless of their location, economic background, gender race and disability’. Ms Morrison said; “While we do not yet know the full impact of the cuts that have been made to date, we can see already that Fife children will be disadvantaged by a much reduced service. The EIS argue that every child should be able to try an instrument and where they have got a talent that should be nurtured and that is something that to date we have been able to offer in our schools. Now that they have made the cut they are talking about having a broader look at the music service. This seems to me to be the wrong way round and therefore we need to establish some clear objectives and principles in terms of the provision we want in our school and the EIS charter moves us in that direction. So any broader look and re examination of music provision must be in the context of the charter”.
The Labour councillor was also scathing of the proposal to redistribute provision based on free schools meals take up. She said; “I am all in favour of making more resources available to areas of disadvantage but you do not do this by reducing access of provision to children in more so called affluent areas. This seems to be a botched attempt at social engineering that in the long run will deny children from all social and economic backgrounds access and opportunity to music provision in Fife. The fact is that the SNP and Lib Dems voted through this cut without having any real knowledge of the impact on schools and children across Fife and that is why we need a charter that sets out the base level of provision for every school and every child”.
