“I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything: for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced, had no existence,” says Arthur Clennam in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit. I don’t think for a moment that wanting one’s child to do well in exams confers Clennam-like qualities on parents. I do think, however, that the ABRSM – and more generally, the system of graded music exams that it dominates – is being mis-used, and that this sets up problematic expectations for parents.

Other countries flourish musically without reliance on the ABRSM. State-funded, serious provision of music teaching will have something to do with it. Yet in the UK, an exam system – and one based on privately funded lessons – is widely regarded as being synonymous with learning an instrument (despite these exams usually being remembered as a miserable childhood experience).

The UK’s mania for measurement is evident more broadly in the intensity and frequency with which we test children at school. A Cambridge University-led study concluded, in 2008, that children in England “are tested longer, harder and younger than anywhere else in the world”. It has got worse since then.

Likewise, measurability is paramount for music exam boards. They aim to quantify the number/absence of mistakes, the appropriateness and consistency of speed, the steadiness of finger-work, correct observation of dynamics and articulation, for example. At the end of the lists of ostensibly objective criteria come some oddly vague ones that seem to me to take pains to avoid the words ‘musical’ or ‘sensitive’, while trying to compensate for their conspicuous absence. The ABRSM’s are ’communicating style and character’ and ‘demonstrating musical involvement’.

None of these skills necessarily confer loveliness, a deep quality of listening, a sense of striving to engage with and express something profound, or sheer joyousness, because these qualities are not objectively verifiable. Yet these qualities are the point of music. What, then, is the point of music exams?

I think exams can sometimes be useful, and I’ll come to that. What concerns me is that from what I’ve seen over 40 years, the exam system is all too often being used to produce exam crammers (‘show ponies’, one teacher calls them; ‘automatons’, writes another). These are children who can play 3 or 4 exam pieces after learning them largely by rote for the best part of a year (in itself, dispiritingly dull). The following year they learn another 3 or 4 pieces and forget the previous ones. When the fundamentals are neglected a law of diminishing returns kicks in and the exams become increasingly stressful. Exam-crammers end up having learnt 20 or so pieces if they “get” Grade 8 and soon become unable to play anything but a scrap of the openings of a couple of pieces. After around a decade of piano lessons and a thousand or so hours of work, they are unable (or disinclined) to pick up a piece of music and make sense of it, let alone play it with another unmeasurable quality: pleasure.

This is the musical equivalent of “barking at print”: an educational phrase that means reading aloud with fluency but without comprehension. It encourages superficial learning by rote.

Ah, but UCAS Tariff Points.

Yes: children can earn tariff points for exams from Grade 6 to 8. I’m sorry, let me fix that: children whose parents can afford a decade or so of private lessons, instrument rental or purchase, sheet music and exam fees can earn tariff points for exams from Grade 6 to 8. Despite the outrageous social injustice of offering a boost in access to university only to those who can afford it, wanting this for your own children is understandable.

Putting aside the issue of what children themselves want, parents then need to instil and actively support proper practising – because it’s not going to become, or remain, a habit on its own. All parents need to do this regardless of whether their kids do exams, but exams are particularly demanding in terms of time. There may also be theory lessons and certainly a significant amount of theory homework over-and-above practising, although the need to demonstrate a modicum of understanding of the squiggles on the score seems to be becoming redundant.

Here’s how I do exams. Grade 8 can be necessary for those wanting to study music, and for no-one else. Other than that: a small minority of children simply like doing exams. (Always diligent, driven children: exams will not motivate unmotivated children.) So we do exams some years but not others, some grades but not all of them – and ‘doing the grades’ has become so ingrained in the UK that a lot of people are surprised to hear that there is absolutely no requirement to do them all, not to mention to do them at all. We do our exams mostly with accredited exam boards that I think are better than the ABRSM. We use the exam to grow: even though there is no curriculum (merely syllabuses), we aim to make an exam formative. We do the work thoroughly and take our time – and we find that, when left alone to learn at our own individual pace, our pace quickens. 

If we choose the increasingly popular video’d performance exams, we turn these into lovely recitals for family and friends, then have chocolate cake afterwards. Your child then leaves my house with their head held high (albeit on a sugar-rush). We get encouraging, constructive comments from the examiners which we take seriously. We get decent marks too, precisely because we have had the time, freed from exam-mania, to learn properly and strive to play music with understanding, sensitivity and joy.