Recommendations for the assessment of music at Key Stage 3 now accompany the revised National Curriculum for both England and Wales. Although some of the material may be helpful to teachers, certain underlying assumptions compromise valid and reliable assessment. Weaknesses arise from initial confusion when formulating attainment targets, the vagueness and ambiguity of music curriculum wording and reliance on End of Key Stage Descriptions for assessing the work of pupils throughout the whole key stage, causing elements of complexity and range to be inappropriately introduced at each assessment point. This article offers an alternative model that puts the assessment of musical quality first and defers the assessment of musical complexity and range of styles until there are pupil profiles later in the key stage.

The 1995 Music National Curriculum orders represent a significant change from the Interim Report of 1990 in which the Music Working Group presented its findings and made recommendations to the Secretary of State for Education for a new curriculum. This article explores developments which have led from the original recommendations to the 1995 Curriculum. As it now stands, the curriculum does not develop children's musical skills and understanding in a systematic way. This is not helpful, even to the music specialist, but also it gives rise to another problem. At Key Stages 1 and 2, where there is possibly no music specialist to interpret it, and where generalist class teachers have traditionally felt ill-equipped to teach music, the 1995 curriculum – because it does not prescribe the work to be done in a systematic and developmental way – fails to make clear the achievements expected at the various levels. Therefore, it does nothing to persuade primary teachers that they can contribute usefully to the skill- and knowledge-development which is essential if children are to move systematically through their musical education. Indeed, the Programmes of Study are so lacking in any sense of development or skill-building that they are exactly the same for each of the first three Key Stages. This study looks at the causes of these difficulties and proposes an original scheme of work to address the problem of teacher confidence at Key Stage 1.

How do we channel teenagers' interest in music? What guides our music teaching today, and what possibilities are there for development and change? These questions have given me occasion to take a closer look at the situation of music teaching today.

Many teachers have asked themselves how we in the comprehensive school and the music school can look after the zest and creative power which are often exhibited by teenagers when they perform music freely, not under the direct control of a teacher. I have also, on quite a number of occasions during lessons, registered resignation and tedium on the part of pupils.

The consequence has been drop-out from music school – sometimes experienced as a relief both by teacher and pupil. Despite the fact that the educational orientation has been based on a ‘musical encounter’ between teacher and pupil, this encounter has not occurred (or has sometimes occurred with a difference which certainly might have been corrected). But the pupil's great interest in music has not diminished – great interest, that is, in music as the pupil understands the term!

In recent times the types of teaching and learning strategies adopted within higher education in British music conservatoires have been reviewed and reformed. This paper provides a case study of some of the newer practices adopted by one such institution, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It focuses on the work of the Performance and Communication Skills Department, and, drawing on participant observations, makes a detailed analysis of the success of the implementation of the teaching and learning aims and objectives. The findings suggest that, not only are the changes adopted by the conservatoire useful, but also that they are beneficial to teachers and students at a number of levels.

Examination criteria, as distinct from guidelines regulating content and presentation, are problematic as applied to musical performance. Given the epistemological gap between musical and conceptual thought, forms of words are not readily available to distinguish objectively between the good and the mediocre performance. Criteria need therefore to be designed to complement the examiner's subjective response rather than substitute for it, and analytical concepts prove to be less reliable than ‘aesthetic terms’ (Sibley). In the context of Western art-music, the ‘good’ musical performance will be one that proposes its own ‘possible world’ (Bruner), situated within the larger ‘world’ of culturally contingent aesthetic values. Aesthetic terms provide the best means we have of access to the experiential world of performed music.

The importance of a cultural context for musical instrument teaching and learning is analysed in terms of situated cognition and cultural validity. It is suggested that the current cultural location of instrument teaching is often associated with a view that confines success to a minority of children, partly by retaining the notion of the concert player as the goal. The nature of this goal and its implications are discussed and compared with traditional instrument learning and playing. Given that recent research suggests that virtuoso players are the product of practice rather than innate talent, the authors argue that a more relevant cultural framework for instrument teaching would result in competent players whose facility with an instrument would be appropriate to their social context.