Benefits Beyond Music: Transferable Skills for Adult Life. Musically active adults on the value of their music education and experiences during childhood and teenage years to adult life beyond music.

The topic of transferable skills from music has been dominated by experimental investigations into benefits for children’s learning across the curriculum, and by arguments whether ‘nonmusical outcomes’ should be used to justify music’s place in the curriculum. Qualitative research has focused to date on the views of music educators, school staff and pupils. In this project musically active adults were asked about their music education and experiences as children and teenagers and, with the benefit of hindsight, what they gained that proved of value in their adult lives outside music.
Findings from initial interviews formed the basis of an online questionnaire sent to music societies and choral groups in three areas of England. The results identified not only skills or meta-skills acquired through music and subsequently valued in other domains, but also source activities and environments associated with particular skill categories. Respondents compared the influence of music with that of sport and other activities: whether or not certain skills are unique to music, it was apparent that for some individuals music was the vital source of transferable skills. The greater variety of activities experienced by pupils, the more opportunity they have to find their route to acquiring such skills; without music in the school curriculum some would be denied such opportunities.
Factors that can influence the effective acquisition and transfer of skills and the implications for music education, inside school and outside it, are discussed. Ensuring balanced content in both instrumental and class teaching and encouraging pupils to reflect on and connect up what they learn across their different musical activities is likely to facilitate skill acquisition and transfer. More broadly, the ability to transfer knowledge and skills across domains is seen as fundamental to the adaptability required for life in the 21st century.