Inclusion remains one of the most pressing and contested concerns in music education. As UNESCO (2009, p. 4) reminds us, ‘inclusive education is not a marginal issue but is central to the achievement of high-quality education for all learners’. The Salamanca Statement (UNESCO, 1994) and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 2006) established a rights-based vision of education that calls for systems to adapt to learners, not learners to systems. This vision reflects the broader shift from the medical model of disability, which locates difficulties within the individual, to the social model, which emphasises how barriers, environments and practices create disabling conditions (Oliver, Reference OLIVER1990; Shakespeare, Reference SHAKESPEARE2006). The social model has been especially influential in education, positioning inclusion not simply as a pedagogical issue but as a political one concerned with whose voices, knowledges and identities are legitimised. As Schmidt (Reference SCHMIDT, BENEDICT, SCHMIDT, SPRUCE and WOODFORD2015) argues, policy itself is a contested space in which certain ideas and actors are privileged while others are marginalised, making engagement with inclusion inseparable from broader struggles over social justice.
Within England, these international frameworks are echoed through national legislation and policy, including the Equality Act (2010), the Children and Families Act (2014) and the SEND Code of Practice (DfE & DHSC, 2015). In music education, the National Plan for Music Education (DfE, 2022) further requires all music hubs to implement inclusion strategies and appoint dedicated inclusion leads. Taken together, these frameworks signal that inclusion is no longer a peripheral aspiration but a statutory, ethical and professional imperative.
At the same time, the meaning of inclusion is far from uniform across the UK. Following devolution, education policy has increasingly diverged across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, reflecting distinct political and ideological priorities. While all nations articulate commitments to inclusion, these often remain symbolic in nature, with broad statements unsupported by clarity around implementation (Knight et al., Reference KNIGHT, CONN, CRICK and BROOKS2023). These policy variations underscore that inclusion cannot be assumed as a stable or universally understood principle; instead, it continues to be contested within educational discourse and practice, including in music education.
When the British Journal of Music Education last editorialised on this theme in 2018, it highlighted the dangers of tokenism, where inclusion was equated with visible moments of participation, for example, a young person in a wheelchair on stage, or with superficial gestures towards diversity in repertoire. While these concerns remain significant, the discourse has since broadened and deepened. Inclusion is now framed not simply as access, but as a process of transformation that implicates structures, practices and pedagogies, and extends into questions of equity, diversity, belonging and social justice.
Scholarship reminds us that inclusion in music education extends beyond disability. Persistent gendered exclusions (Bull, Reference BULL2019; Bull et al., Reference BULL, SCHARFF and COHEN2022), recognition of neurodiversity (Walker, Reference WALKER2021) and attention to wellbeing and mental health, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (Hallam & Himonides, Reference HALLAM and HIMONIDES2022), all highlight the breadth of inclusion’s remit. New technologies, such as accessible digital musical instruments (Förster et al., Reference FÖRSTER, HÄHNEL and ZIEGLER2023), illustrate how innovation can be harnessed to create genuinely inclusive opportunities for musical participation. Yet researchers also caution against tokenistic approaches to diversity (Hess, Reference HESS2015), where different musics are added into the curriculum without disrupting entrenched hierarchies that continue to privilege certain forms of knowledge.
Policy divergences sharpen long-standing concerns about who is afforded recognition within the curriculum. This connects inclusion directly with current debates on decolonisation. As Holder (Reference HOLDER2020) notes, music education must move beyond representational diversity to challenge the Eurocentric hierarchies that continue to shape curricula. This resonates with work across higher education, where decolonisation has been defined as the fundamental questioning of normative and dominant structures (Tan, Reference TAN2021).
Taken together, these developments make clear that inclusion can no longer be understood in simplistic terms. It is not achieved through tokenistic representation or occasional gestures towards diversity. Instead, it is a dynamic and contested process, one that requires continuous reflection on whose musics, voices and identities are legitimised within our classrooms, institutions and policies.
This special issue
The contributions gathered in this special issue, titled Music and Inclusion: Philosophies, Practices and Possibilities, exemplify the richness and diversity of current debates on music and inclusion. We also recognise that this collection cannot capture all of the many and varied dimensions of inclusion. However, the papers foreground questions of care, relationality, participation and justice, while drawing attention to the structural, pedagogical and philosophical conditions through which inclusion is enacted.
We begin with David Baker, who extends recent scholarship in care ethics, exploring how the language used to describe disabled musicians shapes understandings of reciprocity and responsibility, and cautioning against both siloed provision and the risks of benign neglect. Ailbhe Kenny and Chrysi Kyratsou, working ethnographically in two Irish primary schools, highlight how cultural, ethnic and religious differences intersect with school structures and pedagogy, and demonstrate the value of collaborative and extra-curricular musicking in supporting intercultural participation and peer interaction.
Other contributions attend to the systemic framings that shape access and progression. Adam Whittaker, Anthony Anderson, Victoria Kinsella and Martin Fautley interrogate the notion of the music education ecosystem, illustrating how responsibility for inclusion is distributed across a patchwork of stakeholders, each contributing to the developmental trajectories of young musicians in dynamic and uneven ways. This concern with widening access is also evident in Deborah Amend’s reflective account of the Adaptive Music Project (AMP) in the United States, where adaptive pedagogy was employed to broaden participation for pupils with physical disabilities, underscoring the creative problem-solving and staged pedagogical planning required to make instrumental learning genuinely inclusive. Frances Howard, in turn, examines the BeatKnots programme, demonstrating how non-formal approaches to electronic music production both foster young people’s DIY musical practices, often marginalised within school curricula, and expose the enduring socio-economic barriers that constrain progression into the music industries. Leon DeBruin’s and Anthea Skinner’s case study of the Adaptive Music Bridging Program (AMBP) further illuminates the pedagogical dimensions of inclusion, showing how ensemble contexts for disabled students foster self, co- and shared regulation, and how feedback and collaboration can reconfigure belonging, agency and community.
A number of contributions extend the conversation through reflection and theoretical provocation. Nikki Booth and Rachel Wolffsohn, in a dialogic piece, consider the challenges and opportunities surrounding adapted instruments in England through the work of the OHMI Trust, pointing to the need for greater systemic action to embed such provision at scale. Rosie Rushton’s study of the Musical Play Framework demonstrates how non-specialist teaching staff can be supported to facilitate playful musicking with learners with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD), shifting practice away from product-orientation and towards more relational and responsive forms of participation. Furthermore, Nancy Katingima Day’s article offers a philosophical intervention through the African concept of Utu, reframing inclusion and exclusion as matters of belonging, relationality and aesthetic discernment, and positioning music as a fundamental human right and imperative. Finally, Victoria Kinsella and Andrew McPherson develop the conceptual orientation of entangled musicianship, drawing on post-human and diffractive methodologies to challenge humanist paradigms and propose more relational, ethical and co-constitutive approaches to pedagogy, technology and design.
Taken together, these contributions remind us that inclusion in music education is neither a settled concept nor a singular practice. Rather, it is enacted through a plurality of perspectives, contexts and epistemologies, each opening new possibilities for reimagining what it might mean to create, participate and belong in and through music.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Victoria Kinsella is a Professor of Education at Birmingham City University, where she co-leads the Birmingham Music Education Research Group. She has served as both principal and co-investigator on a substantial number of research projects, encompassing diverse settings such as schools, prisons, galleries and arts centres. Her work notably focuses on music education, creativities, composing, the arts and engaging with young people at risk of educational exclusion including those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
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