It's the start of a new academic year and a familiar pattern is about to repeat itself. Students from a variety of locations around the country arrive for their first composition lesson, fresh from seven years of secondary education, no doubt pleased with having passed A level music…

Probation – a word I had always associated with the prison service rather than teaching. In my early naïvety I thought it rather derogatory to use this word to describe my first year as a teacher. A four-year university course was surely enough, I felt, to allow me to remove the learner label and to be fully qualified. But, as I gradually came to realise, the first year in full-time teaching was as much a learning process for me as it was for my pupils.

My training had consisted of a three-year Music and Education degree followed by a one-year PGCE course. I am not entirely certain that PGCE courses are the most effective means of training teachers, because their brevity limits the amount of time spent in schools. However, the system does allow the opportunity of more specialised study first, and I am grateful to have been able to do a teacher training course as well. The breadth of the PGCE studies confused me. At times I wondered whether the study of educational psychology and sociology would be better replaced by more down-to-earth advice on lesson preparation and the control of difficult classes. In retrospect I realise that virtually all the work was useful and, anyway, the music tutorials covered practical matters.

In the music of English ritual dances we have an important though rarely exploited resource for creative work in the classroom. The author examines the range of materials available in the collections of Cecil Sharp and Herbert MacIlwaine, and describes a project in a Lincolnshire Junior School in which children, using Orff instruments, developed their own musical ideas starting from a traditional Derbyshire. Morris tune. They retained the essential characteristics of the tune while, at the same time, making imaginative use of the very considerable possibilities offered for melodic and rhythmic variation.

This year the Jamaica School of Music is celebrating its twenty-first anniversary. The period under review coincides almost exactly with that in which Jamaica has been an independent nation and inevitably there has been a great deal of social, cultural and economic upheaval that has been reflected in the school.

During the first ten years (1961–1972) British influence was strong and the school was modelled on the Royal Schools of Music, with few gains in terms of trained professional skills.

In the period 1972–1983 the school was completely reorganized as a pluralistic and identifiably Jamaican institution with the introduction of full-time curricula designed for training specialists in African–American Music, Western (classical) Music and Music in Education, with due emphasis on Jamaica's rich folk tradition: in educational terms an innovation that often placed the school in conflict with society.

In January 1982 a research project on the assessment of music was set up in Dundee College of Education. The remit of the Project is to investigate new ways of assessing the teaching of music as a practical subject within the 14–16 age range.

Action research was placed under the direction of Mrs Marion Cameron de Quincey, Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology. Dr Ian Macdougall a member of staff in the Music Department of Wester Hailes Education Centre, a six-year comprehensive school in Edinburgh, was invited and appointed to carry out the necessary fieldwork.

The Project, originally scheduled to end in late 1984, is – as a result of interest already created – likely to be extended for a further two years.