The skills are real. The magic isn't.

Trinity’s Career-Ready report shows that young people who study music, drama or dance feel more work-ready and that they leave school with the skills employers want. Professor Karen Burland from the University of Leeds, who has spent two decades studying how musicians move from education into work, argues that the report doesn’t explain how those skills are built. And a case made on outcomes alone is one the sector will lose.

Years ago, I followed a group of music graduates into the rest of their lives. Not all of them stayed in music. One went into business and was told something at her interview she never forgot: the firm wanted her because she had studied music, not in spite of it. They didn’t hire business graduates, they said. They wanted what a musician brings, the creativity, the habit of working with others towards something that has to be right on the night.

She had those skills and what struck me, then and ever since, is that she had very little idea where they had come from.

Trinity College London’s Career-Ready report puts a number on what that employer sensed. Young people who carried on with music, drama or dance beyond the compulsory years feel 19 percentage points more work-ready than those who didn’t, and nine in ten say they have the transferable skills to succeed. It matches what I see in my own research and across the university where I lead the employability agenda: musicians arrive carrying far more than they know.

But read it closely and a question sits underneath every chart. It tells us, plainly, that creative students have these skills and that teachers see them. It does not tell us how they got them. That is treated as a black box. Skills go in, confident young people come out, and the bit in the middle is left to a sort of magical osmosis.

That gap matters. We are forever having to justify music in schools, to parents, to heads, to the people who hold the budgets. Say only that music produces these skills, without saying how, and you have a case anyone can claim and no one can defend. A case you cannot defend is one you will eventually lose.

So where do the skills come from and why can so few of the students who have them say?

Part of the answer is that the skills are real but close to invisible, even to the people who own them. The one-to-one instrumental lesson ought to be the perfect place to name them. A teacher who knows one pupil well, week after week, is better placed than anyone to say: “that was good problem-solving, you found your own way through that passage.” But the lesson time is precious, and it goes, rightly, on the music. The skill stays implicit. We assume the pupil already knows, and we forget that knowing is the one thing they don’t yet have.

At Leeds we now try to fix this through a programme we call Surfacing Skills. The idea is simple. We signpost the skills, give students chances to practise them, assess them and ask them to reflect, as a deliberate strand of their education rather than a happy by-product. Naming the work turns out to be most of the work.

When creative education does this well, it is doing several specific things at once. There is the close feedback of the one-to-one lesson. There is the peer correction of the ensemble, where someone says “you missed that F sharp” and you learn to hear it as help rather than insult. And there is performing in front of other people, getting something wrong and carrying on anyway. None of this happens by default. Some schools and music hubs build it in. Others don’t. When colleagues and I looked at how secondary schools teach the entrepreneurial side of a musical life, the hustling every working musician needs, we found that only about a third do this inside the curriculum. The rest leave it to chance.

There is a deeper point the report misses too. Skills are not the whole of it. Identity matters at least as much: knowing who you are as a musician and what kind of life you want around music, whether it is the career or the lifelong companion. In my own work I break that sense of self into four parts: a feeling of calling, an emotional attachment, a belief in your own ability and a willingness to keep growing. A student strong in all four will push through the tedious hours any instrument demands. One who has never been helped to think about it can reach 21 having built an identity with no room in it for anything going wrong.

And no student does this alone. Whether a young person feels ready for work has much to do with who has been standing around them: teachers, peers, the students a few years ahead and the parents and carers the Trinity report didn’t interview. Non-musician parents bring something musician parents like me cannot. They are amazed by the ordinary. Tell them you learned a piece in a week and they think it is a miracle. That plain astonishment does more for a young person’s confidence than any expert correction.

Which brings me, finally, to this generation, who are easy to criticise and mostly don’t deserve it. Students arrive at university more anxious, more careful and more focused on what sits inside the assessed curriculum. Many work paying jobs because they have to. They have no time for the unpaid, unmarked, risky activities that used to build these skills by accident. The production, the band, the chance to try something and watch it fail.

And here we, the educators, are part of the problem. We have grown risk-averse ourselves, reluctant to set a student up to fail even when failing safely is the whole point. In one business course I know, the tutor pulls the project brief halfway through and tells the students that “the client has changed everything.” The panic is real. Then they rally, find a way, and finish prouder than any exam could make them. That kind of deliberate failure is rare but it shouldn’t be.

So the curriculum now has to do, on purpose, the work that life used to do by accident. Most curricula don’t. The skills creative education produces are real, and the case for protecting it rests on them. But we should stop describing how they appear as a happy mystery.

It was never magic. It was work. And work is something we can name, teach and defend.

Professor Karen Burland is Professor of Applied Music Psychology at the University of Leeds, where she leads the university’s employability agenda and champions its Surfacing Skills programme. She is a clarinettist and saxophonist and chairs the South Yorkshire Music Hub.