durhamjen at my OH's current school, they do have a music lesson a week and the poor head of music is sorely stretched - yet at another school where OH taught, and my daughter attended, they had two full-time music teachers for the little ones. Here they have to have things like choir as an after-school club, and the difference in the quality of the singing is... let's say, noticeable! The older ones in the senior school have no music at all unless they choose it for GCSE or choose to belong to a choir. Your poor son, he must be so frustrated.
My son was a chorister, the cathedral paid for one instrument and singing lessons and we had to pay for another instrument, we paid 50% of school fees and found it so hard to find the money for that lesson every week! His choir school had two full-timers and one music gap student.
In fact my son applied to be a music gap student but that was the year that funding was cut, and all the private schools who would have had to find him accommodation suddenly couldn't afford to. At the same time, giving him a flat rate pocket money of £60 a week plus accommodation plus food was no longer considered lawful, they were all told that he had to be paid on a hourly minimum wage, even though he neither expected nor wanted it particularly. Madness. So all of a sudden, another source of musical education was wiped out overnight. Three good cathedral schools wanted him, all had to write letters of apology changing their minds.
rubylady did the school give the cornet lessons free that recently? I think every state school my children attended (we moved a lot so they had a real mixture) gave free recorder lessons. Because of those, my children went on to love flute and clarinet, rather than the piano lessons they both had as well, and of course being able to read music helped my son to get his choir school scholarship.
Music has always been such a huge part of our family's life, of all varieties, and although I know some children find it and learn an instrument for themselves they don't have a clue about the wonderful range of instruments that they could have chosen from, it's all guitars and keyboards.
My son asked for a guitar for a combined birthday and Christmas present. His father spent hours searching for the perfect one, and he had lessons for that once he had his grade 8 piano out of the way. We couldn't understand why he rarely played anything we could listen to, it was just a series of plinks and plonks as far as we could make out. Eventually DBH had a word with the guitar teacher, to discover that our son didn't want to play it as such - he just wanted to find out how they chords worked so that he could broaden the breadth of music he composed! We could have bought him a cheap acoustic one! The downside of having a slightly aspi son. He never explains things clearly.