Making our case for arts and music education

In June this year, the NSW Parliament called for public submissions to a joint select committee examining arts and music education and training across the state.

Moorambilla Voices welcomes this and has made four practical, highly impactful, and cost-effective interventions. The four recommendations are summarised below.

To read our submission in full, please click here.

1. Implement MV SING

We recommend schools incorporate five (5) minutes of singing every morning in every primary school classroom in the Moorambilla Voices footprint—22 regional and remote NSW Local Government Areas (LGAs). Effective learning requires consistent, typically daily practice, and MV SING is an easy, ready-to-go program comprising 40 regionally inspired songs. 

2. Implement Moorambilla Voices Magic Modules in every primary school classroom in the Moorambilla Voices footprint. 

This program consists of 165 award-winning 30-minute (online) modules developed by Moorambilla Voices and mapped to NSW Curriculum Stages 2-4 across music, dance, visual art and PDHPE. They are ready for immediate use.

3. Support the Moorambilla Voices Skills Development Program

Each year, Moorambilla Voices delivers an intensive and artistically rich program of 95 skill development workshops to schools for upwards of 3,500 students. With more support, we could reach more children more regularly. 

4. Establish a research framework and fund research to consistently capture and quantify arts programs’ social, physical and mental health impacts.

We believe there is an urgent need to establish a framework that will consistently capture and quantify the value and impact of arts education programs on our youth confidence and skills in other life domains, including schooling, community engagement and work.

The committee chair, Ms Julia Finn, said, ‘The joint select committee will inquire into the quality and effectiveness of arts and music education and training. In particular, we will look into how the arts, culture and creative industries can coordinate with the education system to support the development of creative skills.’ 

Drawing on over 20 years of experience working in regional and remote NSW arts education, we know that our recommendations will deliver immediate and meaningful impacts on students, teachers, schools and their broader communities look forward to hearing and seeing the results of this committee.

Our Founder, Artistic Director and Conductor of Moorambilla Voices, Michelle Leonard, spoke at the committee’s second hearing on August 23, appearing before the committee via video link from the Moorambilla Residency Camps in Baradine. To read the full transcript of this session, please click here. Below are a couple of paragraphs from her introduction;

I’m on residency camp now. I have 90 girls in the hall that I can see across the road. They absolutely love singing and being engaged in the creative arts. Four days ago, I had 50 primary-age boys. Five days before that, I had another 70 year 3 children in Birralii, and then we had 90 adolescents. Everything that we strive to do comes from a place where the children’s voice must be heard. It is our first instrument. It is cheap. Everyone owns one. They do not have to make a financial investment. It is also something that speaks directly to our shared experience, intergenerationally. As far as I have seen in the last 20 years next year, children and adults who can start their day with something that gives them a connection to each other, particularly when they’re singing, have a better likelihood of being able to concentrate and approach, with a positive world view, any of the challenges of many of the educational environments that our children work in. 

They are able to have more resilience—or the Americans would call it grit—to be able to continue. Every child that I have seen in my workshops, in some capacity, has been able to give themselves a voice. Not all of the children sing like angels but, as we know, not all of the adults sing like angels. But it is the pursuit of it and their tenacity and normalisation of making music a basic human right. That is what I would like to frame everything that we are doing in. I listened very briefly to the previous speaker from the Conservatorium of Music who drew everyone’s attention to the fact that within our national artistic framework, we are hoping to have a First Nations voice embedded deeply in everything that we do. It’s an extraordinarily positive world view and it is one that has always being done through an integrative, collaborative, artistic approach that is intergenerational. We’re just normalising what has always been there.

To follow the progress of this Joint Select Committee on Arts and Music Education and Training in New South Wales, please click here.