The second category of specialist teacher is similarly qualified, by
degree or diploma or both, but teaches only for part of his time in the
school. Some of these part-time teachers occupy the rest of their time
in giving private lessons in their homes, in church posts as organists
and choirmasters, or in playing in professional orchestras. Others are
teachers who serve two or more schools. Such teachers are useful in
two ways. First, they are employed in rural areas where the schools
(including the grammar schools) may be too small to include in their
teaching staffs anyone competent to take charge of music. Secondly,
they are increasingly used to give instrumental tuition in groups of
schools where the full-time music specialists are too busy, or lack the
necessary technical knowledge, to teach instrumental classes. An
interesting feature of the work of a peripatetic teacher is that it often
covers several stages of education and several types of school-pri-
mary, secondary modern, grammar, technical and so on. It is, there-
fore, work that may be attractive to a teacher with an original and
enterprising outlook and an adaptable personality.
Apart from the visits of such teachers, specialization is comparatively
rare in primary schools. The main reason for this is that teachers of
young children (aged 4 to 7) are encouraged to treat their classes as
self-contained family units, and themselves to give the children simple
musical experiences as frequently and as informally as possible. At the
junior stage of the primary school (age 7 to ll), where technical
demands are greater, there may be some measure of specialization.
Primary school music specialists, where they exist, are usually women
(and, in junior schools, men also) who have taken music as a subject
of advanced study in their normal two-year training courses, and they
constitute my third category of specialists. A small minority of them
have continued their study for a third year in what we call a course of
supplementary study. It goes without saying that these primary school
specialists are seldom equipped with the technical knowledge of music
one expects of a graduate or possessor of a diploma, but they often
compensate for deficiencies of knowledge through a firm command of
performing skills within a modest range, an understanding of the
psychology of young children, and sound general teaching ability.
Nevertheless, there is in England a serious shortage of teachers who
combine good musicianship with real interest in teaching children
between the ages of 7 and 11, and this junior stage is setting us some
of our most difficult problems. Many of the secondary modern schools
brought into existence by the Education Act of 1944 also have music
specialists of this category, and here too there is an inadequate supply
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