Buckinghamshire Music Trust and the Music Education Hub are both passionate about providing opportunities for all children and making sure that all children can take part in them.

Our vision statements say:

• Promoting opportunities for all students to access meaningful and high quality vocal and instrumental experiences including opportunities to progress to the highest levels of excellence.
• Promoting and supporting the importance of music in all children’s lives as something valuable, rewarding and fun.
• Working actively to overcome barriers that prevent musical opportunity, providing solutions to any form of exclusion whether through special needs, disability, ability to pay, gender, geographical location, cultural background or lack of support.

What do we do?

• We provide subsidies for all fees for all activities for families eligible for Free School Meals and for siblings.
• We will always consider individual circumstances to try to overcome financial barriers to music engagement.
• We subsidise Whole Class Practical Musicianship (‘Wider Opportunities’) in primary schools by about 60% of the cost to work towards this being a universal provision across the county.
• We work with other agencies and partners (such as Social Services, Family Resilience, Chiltern Music Therapy, Specialist Teacher Service, Youth Centres) to provide pathways into music for young people who may not otherwise have those opportunities.
• We have and are developing ‘satellite’ music centres for younger pupils in parts of the county where the 3 main music centres are difficult to get to.
• We work with a range of community groups and festivals, providing support for them with facilities, administration and networking to promote their projects and activities.
• In all our developments we place equal value on all kinds of music and seek to support and explore opportunities in the formal and informal sectors.
• We provide instrument loans at a price that covers only the administration and maintenance of instruments.