A London music teacher reads about France’s school money that never arrives and realises the British instrument cupboard has been waiting since 2011
Saturday, 24 October 2026. Kentish Town. Half term, no pupils until Monday, a bath, a book and a grudge, 3.30pm.
A Sentence I Recognised From Every School I Have Visited
This week I read the report on France’s cobblestone economy and the school money that is permanently in transit, in which the French education ministry explains, in response to student protests over missing teachers and overcrowded classrooms, that the money for schools exists and is currently in transit. I read the sentence on the bus. I laughed so loudly a man across the aisle took his earbuds out to check I was all right.
I was not all right. I was remembering every school music cupboard I have ever opened. I go into three primary schools a week as a visiting teacher, and every single one has a cupboard. In the cupboard there is a set of glockenspiels with half the bars missing, a single snare drum with no snare, twelve recorders that nobody wants to put in their mouth, and a box marked NEW INSTRUMENTS that is empty. When I ask about the new instruments, someone always says the money is coming. It is coming. It is in transit.
The Committee For The Efficiency Of Efficiency Measures
The report’s French ministry forms a Committee for the Efficiency of Efficiency Measures, with eleven members, a secretariat of forty and a subcommittee on lunch. I have sat in on exactly this committee in a school in Camden. It was called the Arts Provision Steering Group. It had nine members, a deputy head who mainly ate biscuits, and a terms of reference document longer than the national curriculum. It met three times. It decided to ask the parents’ association to hold a bake sale for a keyboard. The bake sale raised forty-one pounds. The keyboard cost three hundred. We now have a seventh of a keyboard.
Teachers Absent, Substitutes Absent, Wednesday Unexplained
My favourite moment in the piece is a sixteen-year-old student explaining that her chemistry class has a regular teacher on Thursdays and a substitute for that teacher on Tuesdays, and nobody has explained Wednesday. A ministry official says Wednesday has been classified as pending, and that a form to explain it is available at an office that is currently blockaded.
I know Wednesday. Everybody who has worked in a British school knows Wednesday. On Wednesday the music room is used for exams, or for a visiting speaker on internet safety, or for storing the PE mats because the hall roof is leaking. On Wednesday the visiting music teacher teaches in a corridor next to the photocopier, which is in the key of B flat and plays a long continuous drone that, I will admit, works beautifully under folk songs.
The 1968 Problem
The report points out that overcrowded classrooms were on the student grievance list in 1968 and are on it again in 2026, making them the only item from 1968 that has never needed repair, to the point where the culture ministry has opened a file to classify the overcrowded classroom as a historic monument. In Britain, I would nominate the school piano. Every school I visit has one upright piano that was donated by someone’s grandmother in roughly 1968, has never been tuned since, and has a middle C that sounds like a door closing in another building. It is a monument. It should have a plaque. The plaque would also be out of tune.
What Music Teachers Actually Need
I want to say something serious, because this is my diary and it is half term and I am in the bath. Music in schools does not need a grand programme with a logo and a launch event. It needs instruments that work, a room that is not also a corridor, and a teacher who is paid enough to keep turning up. It is the least glamorous list in the world. That is exactly why nobody funds it. You cannot cut a ribbon on a tuned piano.
Elsewhere on this diary I once wrote about grand gestures like adding faces to Mount Rushmore, which is the opposite end of the budget scale. Governments love a monument. Monuments are visible. A child learning to play the F chord properly in a corridor next to a photocopier is not visible to anyone, except the child, the teacher and occasionally the school caretaker, who once told me that hearing my Year Four class murder Hot Cross Buns on twelve recorders was the highlight of his week. He was being sincere. He is a very strange man. I love him.
The Cobblestones Again
The most quoted line from the French piece in my staffroom chats this week has been the one about paving stones. Paris paid to lay them, paid to cover them in asphalt and now has a third contract in tender to uncover some of them for tourists. Our observation box calls it not infrastructure but a relationship. A teaching assistant in Gospel Oak messaged me to say that is exactly what has happened to music in her school. It was in the curriculum, then it was covered over, and now there is talk of uncovering a bit of it for Ofsted.
Bath getting cold. Book unread. Grudge fully intact. On Monday I will go back to three schools, open three cupboards and teach forty children to play a song on instruments held together with Sellotape and faith. The money is in transit. The children are not. They are here now, and they would like to learn the F chord.