Although participants' views of their own general effectiveness as teachers and as musicians changed very little over the period of the study, their attitudes towards music teaching and perceptions of the skills required showed some changes.

The article reports an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study of the early career experiences of secondary school music teachers in England, set within a wider national picture of decreasing age-related pupil engagement with school music, career perceptions of music teaching, variable patterns of teacher recruitment and possible mismatches between the musical biographies of young people and intending music teachers. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from a short-term longitudinal survey (first questionnaire: n = 74, second questionnaire: n = 29), supplemented by case studies (n = 6) and open-ended, written questions (n = 20). Analyses suggest that only a half of the newly qualified participants chose to teach full-time in a mainstream, statefunded school music classroom. Of these, the majority were faced with a range of early career challenges stemming from curricular, extra-curricular and non-curricular school expectations. These included the need to balance their existing musical performer identity with that of being a new teacher.

This article suggests that large-scale, complex technological installations are not necessarily the ones that offer the best professional development experiences to practitioners and educators. It explores how the economist E. F. Schumacher's concept of “intermediate technology” can be used to describe small, low-cost technological tools that pervade the daily working lives of music teachers. These tools are likely the ones that will support professional development.

Local authority music services have held a central place in the UK's music education landscape since the end of the second world war. Nonetheless, the provision of these services has always been a non-statutory responsibility and local levels of opportunity have varied in response to prevailing economic and political climates, along with broader developments in educational policy. The first half of this paper focuses on the implications of two key policies enacted during the 1990s. Both were linked to perceived changes in the profiles of young people who engaged with music service tuition. The latter half presents an ecological study of practical implications of the second policy-the 'Music Standards Fund'-on primary-aged children's take up of, and persistence with, the tuition in one English local authority. At both area and school levels, the children's engagement cohered with various socioeconomic and contextual factors. This coherence is considered from the perspectives of Connell's 'neo-liberal parent' and related, Bourdieusian-influenced theories. The conclusion offers implications from the implementation of the policy in the contemporary era of 'Music Education Hubs', the successor organisations to local authority music services, and the schools these hubs serve.

Recent developments in geographical information systems and geospatial statistics, together with greater access to large, fine-resolution 'geocoded' data sets, are transforming environmental, social and economic research. Over the past decade, there has been a small, but growing application of these techniques within the fields of music making, music education and music research. This article begins by offering a brief overview of some of the developments as a whole. It goes on to offer a detailed treatment of a series of geospatial statistical techniques which, it is hoped, may be applicable within a wide range of music and music education research fields. These techniques are illustrated through references to a deviant idiographic case study dealing with instrumental tuition provided by one English local government area (local authority) between 2003 and 2010. The case study draws on analyses of detailed anonymized participant records (n = 6063) using, amongst other techniques, location quotients, tests for spatial autocorrelation and distinct distributions and 'global' and 'local' regression models. The article will demonstrate how these techniques can be applied using open-source software and freely available census, government and cartographic data.