Digby, Julie Fiona; (2020) Teacher confidence to facilitate children's musical learning and development in the Reception Year at school. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The Reception year occupies a unique position in the English education continua, straddling two contrasting curricula approaches towards teaching and learning. This study sought to address the lack of research into music pedagogy and practice for this particular cohort. Responding to concerns of a reported decreasing visibility of music in the curriculum, this thesis explored teacher confidence in respect of musical learning and development of the children in the Reception class. Grounded in a circular theoretical framework, developed from the principles of hermeneutic philosophy, this small-scale mixed methods study adopted an explanatory sequential research design. Thus, questionnaire survey data served to provide a broad contextual frame in which to situate a more in-depth study proffered by participant interviews. A quasi-purposive sampling of a particular population of Reception teachers in the East of England provided the questionnaire respondents (n=39), whilst the interview participants (n=8) emerged as a `nested` subset in this mixed methods study. Findings evidence that some teachers are struggling to incorporate regular opportunities for music teaching and learning in the Reception curricula, due to: (1) internal as well as external constraints and challenges; (2) a bias toward the functional uses of music for extrinsic purposes - such as a vehicle to scaffold other learning - rather than for any intrinsic value; (3) a disconnect between strong personal and comparatively weak professional musical identities as expressed by most of the participants; (4) a reported lack of teacher confidence to develop children's musical learning within the EYFS framework due to poor levels of skills, knowledge and understanding with regard to musical pedagogical practices. These findings emerge at an opportune time to help inform policy and practice, as research in early childhood music education becomes more prevalent, further to the recent changes to the Ofsted framework (2019), as well as the forthcoming publication of the revised National Plan for Music Education (2020).

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