Welcome to Youth Music’s London regional homepage.  This is a new site section dedicated to information specific to your region.

I’m Trevor Mason the Regional Executive Officer for London. Did you know that there are a staggering 700 musical events held in London every week, from calypso steel bands to clog dancing. These events involve some 1250 acts ranging from classical music orchestras to club DJs. And that's not including small local music events such as pub bands and local discos. London has around 600 recognised venues where music is regularly performed, and a further 1000 venues licensed by local authorities for occasional public entertainment. Living and working in London presents many opportunities whatever your background and aspirations.

Total spending on music by London consumers and London-based companies is over £1.1billion. Londoners also spend around £128million annually on musical instruments and £18million on sheet music. London has an estimated 1250 record companies, over 650 firms involved in artist management, 877 retail outlets, 189 recording and post-production studios, 76 distributors, 60 manufacturers of musical instruments and 40 manufacturing companies. Major creative and media companies are based in London, including the BBC and other broadcasters, publishing companies and record companies.

Local and regional government
London presents a deep and dense array of structures, initiatives and agencies that could at first glance confuse any newcomer to music education in London. London has a complex infrastructure with 32 local authorities and the Corporation of the City of London who work together on matters of common interest via London Councils (formerly the Association of London Government), regional government through the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the functional bodies including Transport for London (TfL) and the London Development Agency (LDA). In addition there is the Government Office for London (GOL), which is responsible for the co-ordination and delivery of central government functions specific to London. This complexity in itself raises challenges to increase opportunities to participate in the capital.

The Greater London Authority (GLA) has established a Cultural Strategy (2004) with the aim of making London a world-class creative city. Most individual borough authorities have their own officer or team responsible for arts development. The role and resources of each team vary from one local authority to the next and teams sit within a variety of departments including Leisure, Cultural Services and Environment. Music currently does not feature strongly in local authorities' corporate priorities. This makes it even more challenging for local authorities to defend their music education and arts budgets and services against more highly weighted and statutory services. London's unique political structure, with its elected mayor, Regional Assembly and 33 local authorities, provides a range of potential valuable partnerships.
Music currently does not feature strongly in local authorities' corporate priorities. This makes it even more challenging for local authorities’ arts officers to defend their music education and arts budgets and services against more highly weighted and statutory services.

London’s music education economy
Annual spend from public sources on music in London is around £95million. Almost all this (90%) goes to classical music. Research carried out in 2005 suggests pop music is the most popular genre nationwide, but it is the least popular in London where there is a greater diversity of taste than elsewhere in the country.

At a modest estimate, London’s music education industry is worth around £35million per annum. Private music tuition is estimated to be worth £19million. After that the largest funder and employer of music educators are the borough music services. In total, London’s 33 local authorities will receive a total of nearly £8.9million in 2006-07 for school music tuition from the Department for Children, Schools & Families. This figure rises to nearly £12.5million in 2007-08. These figures do not include contributions from the local authorities’ own resources, other sources and earned income (such as parental contributions and earnings from concerts), so the amount is likely to be significantly higher. Nor are the grants made by various trusts, foundations and other public bodies (such as youth services, arts development departments, etc) included in this figure.

Arts Council England funds young people’s music-making eight times more than Youth Music in the capital. In the financial year 2005-06, Youth Music made over £520,000 worth of project grant awards for music education activity involving under 18s. In 2006, ACE recurrently funded 32 orchestras, venues, opera companies, festivals, touring, development and community music organizations nearly £53million. Of this figure, £3.85million (7.3%) went to their associated education programmes, largely aimed at children and young people.

Youth Music’s ‘out-of-school hours’ funding has concentrated on inner London boroughs. Between 1999 and 2005, Youth Music awarded 506 grants in London of which £5,160,000 (300 grants) was awarded to activity in inner London, whereas £2,532,000 (168) went to outer London boroughs and a further £674,000 over 38 projects covering the whole region. The outer London boroughs are therefore more reliant on ‘in-school’ and formal teaching via the music services as their music education provider.
Every secondary school is set to be designated an academy or specialist in one or more curriculum areas by 2010 (currently there are 35 music colleges out of 2,602 designated specialist schools across England). London has 10 music status and over 60 performing arts college status schools.
For further information about specific grants please visit the looking for funding page of our website.

London’s demographics
London is the most populous city in the European Union with 7.3 million residents. It is unique in terms of the diversity of its citizens and communities, and has a vibrant, dynamic and international image (30% of the population are from a black and minority ethnic groups and 24% born outside the UK). London is not only the most diverse city in the UK, it is the most diverse in Western Europe with more than 50 different ethnic communities and 300 languages spoken. Nearly a third of London's schoolchildren have English as an additional language. But London imposes many constraints on its residents. They have the longest working hours nationally and the longest commutes which make it even harder for the city's disproportionately high working-age parents/carers to include music-making as part of their daily routine, leading to variations in access and pockets of inequality. Many pupils can be excluded through transport difficulties, poor access to an instrument, lack of money or conflicting interests.

It is a young city, with more than one-fifth of the population under 18 - a higher proportion than in most other cities in Europe. This obviously impacts on family life and stimulates demand for 'wrap around' provision and enhanced or extended curricular activity. Nearly half (48%) of children in inner London are living in households with incomes below the official poverty line (after housing costs are taken into account), compared with 26% in outer London and 30% nationally. Twenty-nine percent of London's children live in overcrowded households, compared to 12% in England and Wales. The rate of recorded crime per 1,000 population is higher than anywhere else in England and 45% of Londoners cite crime as their biggest concern. There are both the largest number of millionaires per head of population and the poorest boroughs in the country.

Visit the Regional Policy page for London