Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Brown for the question. I am not aware of those comments but I am a very strong supporter of all school-aged children getting access to music education. In my experience, having done a lot of BER openings in the last couple of years, I have been to a lot of primary schools and generally they put on a school performance and it is of a very high quality and reflects the strong primary school music program through Catholic, independent and government schools. So I am concerned if there is not that specialist support—and I have also got a brother-in-law who is a specialist primary school music teacher. I understand a lot of schools do have very strong programs and have very strong results, so I would be concerned if that is not as pervasive as your question suggests. But it is the case that this government strongly supports formal musical education in the schools and, as you know, musical education has been included in the development of the national curriculum, so we do take that very seriously, in part just because of the value of music itself. But it is linked to improved health and wellbeing, it is linked to better student engagements in all types of learning and it has been shown that long-term participation in music programs improves children's grades in academic subjects such as English and maths—although it has not worked for one of my boys in the maths area despite him being a very good musician. But, as I say, the government does support formal teaching of music by specialists being available to all schoolchildren and I am happy to ask the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth for any further advice. It is in the national curriculum, it is strongly supported and my experience in recent times is that there are very strong programs in hundreds of primary schools that I have been associated with in recent years. (Time expired)