Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Group for Research into Music Education (GRiME) draws together music education specialists from different age phases and educational contexts to generate up-to-date, discipline-specific knowledge which has an impact on all those who teach and learn music. The group is led by a core team of Cardiff Met academics who are active in both research and teaching, and who have all taught in a wide variety of educational contexts beyond the university.

The group engages with experts, scholars and all those with a stake in the teaching and learning of music across Wales and beyond, including conservatoires, music services and academics. Music is taught not only by qualified classroom teachers but also a diverse population of peripatetic teachers, PPA cover companies and freelance musicians, as well as by primary school teachers who would consider themselves non-specialists in the subject. As well as the mainstream classroom, music is taught in county ensembles, Saturday ‘stage schools’, music colleges, and in informal private tuition settings. Such a complex ecosystem of learning leads to a diversity of needs, and this specialist research group aims to serve the whole of the music education landscape.

Working within a reformed Welsh education system which encourages the creation of ‘powerful connections’ between subject disciplines (Donaldson, 2015, p. 68), the group engages and collaborates with specialists from related disciplines to enrich the dialogue and learning experiences of all those who experience the arts. However, the research group is driven by a strong belief that powerful learning is built on the foundations of strong subject disciplines, and the ‘cherished ideas and ways of thinking that each subject contains’ (Fautley and Savage, 2013, p. 2).