Identifying Musical Talent and Potential

Identifying Musical Talent and Potential (ITP) exists to make music education fairer.

ITP tackles one of the biggest obstacles to talented young people’s musical progress: many teachers have limited experience of how to identify musical potential in the first place. Primary school class teachers generally have very little musical training, so their limited confidence can be a stumbling block; this inevitably affects their ability to identify young people’s musical potential in their classes. Alongside this, instrumental teachers working as part of the wider Music Education Hub partnerships can focus too much on instrumental proficiency, which can get in the way of them spotting early potential in a child who has never had the opportunity to play an instrument.

ITP has developed into two strands: face-to-face or online training and a series of online film resources, used within the training and also available online.  The film resources highlight key facets of musical potential: the facilitators use creative musical activities to help teachers identify potential in young people, in a wide range of formal and informal educational contexts. They show how some commonly used group musical activities can challenge what teachers believe they are learning about their group from doing them.