Adam Ockelford

Music education for pupils with severe or profound and multiple difficulties - current provision and future need

There is a general agreement about the important role that music can play in the education and daily lives of children with severe or profound and multiple learning difficulties. But what are the distinctions and relationships between music education, music therapy and music as a vehicle for other forms of learning, occupation, development or engagement? To what extent are professionals in schools aware of these issues and prepared to explore them from an informed perspective? In this article, Dr Adam Ockelford, Deputy Director of Education and Employment for the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB), Sally Zimmermann, Music Education and Employment Advisor (RNIB); and Professor Graham Welch, Chair of Music Education and Head of the School of Arts and Humanities, Institute of Education, University of London, present and expand on the key findings from their recent research project, ‘PROMISE’, which examined the Provision of Music in Special Education and specifically in schools for pupils with severe or profound and multiple difficulties. The authors conclude their paper with an acknowledgement that a great deal of significant work takes place in these contexts at present but that further research, leading to the provision of new resources for curriculum and staff development, is crucial to the realisation of music’s full potential in the lives of pupils with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties.

`Sounds of Intent': mapping musical behaviour and development in children and young people with complex needs

This article reports on the first year of an Esmée Fairbairn Foundation-funded research project into the design and evaluation of an original `framework for mapping the behaviour and development in, and through, music for children with complex needs, specifically those with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD). An initial four-month design and pilot phase critiqued and evaluated a framework that was grounded in video-based iterative analyses of individual case studies that had been collected during the previous two years. The piloting phase was followed by a sustained period of classroom-based music lesson observation in five special schools over a period of seven months. A total of 630 observations were made using the framework for 68 participants whose ages ranged from 4 years 7 months to 19 years 1 month. Subsequent analyses support the general design features of the observational framework and provide new evidence of PMLD musical behaviour and development.

An empirical exploration of the zygonic model of expectation in music

Aspects of the ‘zygonic’ model of expectation in music (Ockelford, 2006) were tested experimentally. Forty subjects were played a diatonic melody, starting with the initial note only, then the first two notes, and so on. Each time, subjects were asked to sing what they considered to be the most likely continuation. The results were compared with the outputs of three algorithms derived from the zygonic model, which took into account adjacency (‘Z1’), adjacency and recency (‘Z2’), and adjacency, recency, and between-group projections (‘Z3’). Each algorithm modelled the perceptual responses with statistically distinct degrees of accuracy; Z3 was the most faithful to subjects’ expectations. Given the empirical data, potential refinements to the quantification of the zygonic model were considered. Additionally, it was found that men and women exhibited different patterns of expectation in relation to the stimuli that were presented, paralleling recent neuropsychological data suggesting that the location of music-structural processing in the brain may differ by gender.

Sounds of intent, phase 2: gauging the music development of children with complex needs

This article reports the latest phase of research in the Sounds of intent project, which is seeking, as a long‐term goal, to map musical development in children and young people with severe, or profound and multiple learning difficulties (SLD or PMLD). Previous exploratory work had resulted in a framework of six putative music‐developmental stages set across three domains of musical engagement: reactivity, proactivity and interactivity. This was intended as a first step in enabling teachers and therapists to gauge their pupils’ levels of musical development. The research described in this paper indicates that a moderately fine‐grained observation schedule (involving three sub‐levels per Sounds of intent developmental stage) may be sufficient to show longitudinal change in the observed musical engagement of pupils with PMLD, three groups of whom participated in a specially designed programme of musical activities over a six‐month period. However, mapping the individual’s levels of attainment onto their chronological ages indicates that, generally speaking, musical progress is likely to be made in tiny increments – notionally equivalent to around one Sounds of intent level during a child’s entire time in compulsory education (4–16 in the UK). This suggests that an even finer‐grained observation scheme may be of value to practitioners seeking to chart change in the longer term. It is proposed that this should be the subject of further research, and should comprise two components: level and frequency of engagement.

Sounds of Intent: Interactive Software to Assess the Musical Development of Children and Young People With Complex Needs

This article outlines research in the final phase of the Sounds of Intent project, which explores musical development in children and young people with complex needs. This has been undertaken through observation and analysis using the previously developed ‘‘Sounds of Intent’’ schedule, which was designed through amassing 630 observations of children’s engagement in musical activities, fused with the findings of mainstream developmental music psychology and ‘zygonic’ theory, a psychomusicological approach to understanding how music makes sense to us all and building on previous extended fieldwork in schools. The main output will be a musical development framework package of web-based technology, containing video, photographs, and descriptions of children’s musical engagement. Practitioners can use the software to assess their pupils/clients, record their attainment and prog- ress, and download curriculum materials. The software is designed to become a user-owned constantly evolving, ‘‘wiki-based’’ resource, to which practitioners would contribute their own resources, ideas and views.

Technology, SEN and EY

In this chapter, we present a novel framework of musical development in the Early Years, which is informed by the now well-established Sounds of Intent (SoI) framework for the assessment of the musical development of children and young people with complex needs. Notwithstanding the novelty of the SoI paradigm, where the Special Educational Needs (SEN) world is now coming to inform the so-called mainstream world of Early Years (EY) education, we raise the importance of the conceptualisation of an extensible taxonomy of music educational technologies. We suggest that the theoretical framework of Sounds of Intent in the Early Years is a robust platform on which the proposed taxonomy can sit, and propose a way forward in developing such a taxonomy. We pose that this will lead to the decoupling from current practice that is believed to be tool-centric, often industry driven and not necessarily one that fosters critical thinking that places the child on the centre of the focus.