Well, apparently he’s both in front of and behind the plan. In fact, Mayor Boris Johnson is clearly excited by this project.
Click here to listen to him speaking about music education and this new project.
There are many local music services,orchestras, arts organisations, charities and schools which do excellent work. This strategy sets out how we will champion them, help them to grow and reach out to more Londoners.
It is great to see such a plan put together, that clearly has the sort of real deal buy-in from the grass tops and the grass roots, led by the Mayor of London. The plan does fall short on financial commitment, by just about any measure of school funding. That being said, it has promise to jump-start something provided that this plan can be supported and is used a the platform for growth.
This plan and the support behind it reminds me of this plan below, from 1996, which had the same top down and bottom up city-wide support that doesn’t come along all that often:
Richard,
I was all set to give Boris Johnson a “strawberry” of approval on my blog for this — until I read the amount of money he has allocated: “More than £250,000 is being put into a range of projects under the Mayor’s plans to boost musical opportunities for young Londoners, both as players and as audiences, including the Music Education Fund, which is worth £100,000.”
London has 8 million people, and how many schoolchildren?
So I stopped. Money isn’t everything, of course, but it sends a message, too.