In the early piloting of Musical Futures the development team were regularly asked to give a simple, one-sentence definition – a summation of how the approaches were different. That was a challenging task, as our pioneering pathfinder teams were trialling a complex series of actions, which spanned a wide spectrum of teacher/practitioner approaches.

Perhaps the most radical of those actions, and the ones that advocated little or no instruction from the teacher in the first few lessons, were those that became known as ‘informal learning’. These approaches were soon taken up by a large number of schools.