Addressing the concerns of conservatoire students about school music teaching

While most of the students who graduate each year from the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London build performance-based portfolio careers that include some teaching, very few of them enter secondary school class music teaching. This article describes how young musicians' concerns about the career of secondary class music teacher develop as they move from sixth former to first year RCM undergraduate to third year undergraduate, and proposes some ways in which these concerns may be addressed. RCM students often agree strongly with statements consistent with a positive attitude to teaching, such as feeling a sense of achievement when pupils learn, and considering that teaching is about helping pupils realise their musical potential. However, they also tend to think that secondary class music teaching is not ‘doing music’. Successful secondary music teachers may take a different view, and the effect on RCM students of working with such teachers is reported descriptively.