Ironically, possible even tragically, there seems to be two government iniatives cancelling each other out. The brilliant wider opportunities programme has not just brought practical music-making to thousands more children in the UK. It has, according the report commissioned by FMS, brought all those extras that we have all for so long argued for: increased academic acheivement, self-esteem and social co-operation and the like. And in particular, we, in Leeds, have been able to target the inner-city: the schools where the asylum-seekers and the relatively poorer families live and go to school. We too have learnt things ourselves: that not all of these children have arrived from cultural deserts. And they bring with them what they learnt in Ivory Coast, in Ghana, in the Czech Republic, in Poland and absolutely all the rest.

On the other hand, the government is promoting a new type of school they call an academy. I am opposed to this for all sorts of reasons not appropriate to go into here. But the way that academies are funded takes them out of local authority control and influence. So, it will cost a lot more for academies to buy in tuition from their local music service. Plus they will be ineligible for all the perks that make most schools continue to pay for increasingingly expensive tuition eg performance weeks. Will the new academies go on buying from their local music services. What will have to change? Is it really a problem?