You Can Only Encourage Ambition If You Have First Been Given the Vision
Last weekend, Kingham Lodge hosted three concerts as part of the Dean and Chadlington Music Festival. Two others took place at Chipping Norton Theatre, a third at Bruern Farm, and a gala in the theatre at Heythrop (a Warner Resort Hotel but a splendid historic site). A Desert Island Discs took place in Chadlington Church. Between them, they told a story about ambition, talent, and the pipeline that connects a child’s first encounter with music to a life lived in it — and about how perilously narrow that pipeline has become.
Act One: A Weekend of Music
The festival began at The Theatre Chipping Norton, where seventy primary school children spent a day with the Academy of Barmy Composers (ABC — Anybody Can), discovering opera. They were not passive observers. They jumped, they moved, they learned songs, they learnt about composers, they clapped in time and they laughed. By the end of the day they understood something about the nature of opera as a total experience, where opera came from, who had written it, and why it had mattered for four centuries. After lunch, sixty more children joined parents and friends for a short concert. The theatre was full.
Later that evening, in the same venue, the brilliant Craig Ogden was part of the Aquarelle Guitar Quartet, together demonstrating the skills, teamwork and empathy that come from years of study and practice and the friendships formed over decades in a musical experience enjoyed by a packed theatre. They demonstrated the heights to which ambition and hard work have taken them.
On Saturday morning, Amol Rajan — who presents University Challenge and spent several years on Radio 4’s Today programme — was interviewed by Lord Chadlington for his version of Desert Island Discs. Amol spoke about his upbringing: parents from large Indian families from different parts of India who had come to England and encouraged their children’s ambitions with everything they had. He spoke about going to Cambridge, editing the Varsity magazine, and building a career in journalism and broadcasting. And he spoke, with real passion, about what he called the disgraceful waste of talent represented by the numbers of young people who are NEET — not in education, employment or training. He was dismayed that politicians were not doing more. He spoke about the importance of ambition in education, and about how we have lost sight of it.
That evening, in the Pavilion at Kingham Lodge, we heard something that made his words resonate still more. Young singers, just leaving the conservatoire and embarking on professional careers in opera, competed for a prize awarded by the Dean and Chadlington Music Festival. The standard was extraordinary. These are young artists who have already achieved so much, and who will go on to achieve so much more. Two nights earlier, we had enjoyed a dinner at Bruern Farm at which last year’s winner, Charlotte Du-Cann, soprano, sang opera scenes accompanied by a fine young tenor, Matthew Curtis — a name to watch out for. On Sunday morning, young pianists, a violinist, and a cellist from the junior division of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire performed in the Pavilion. To hear pianists of this quality and feeling, at this age, is genuinely moving. We had invited local schools to send any young pianists who might like to listen, tickets for the child and a parent paid for by Cotswolds Arts Through Schools and the Music Festival. One of them — who had won his class at the Chipping Norton Music Festival in March — stayed after the concert ended to play the piano himself for a while. That image stays with me; as does the image of him and his family being encouraged by the mother of one of the older youngsters who had just performed, and who is now going to the Royal College of Music. A family needs support as well as the youngster trying if ambition is to be realised.
Act Two: The Pipeline That Closes
What Amol Rajan said about ambition and wasted talent connects directly to what the Milburn Review (’Young People and Work’, 2026) found when it examined the causes of youth economic inactivity. The Review noted that the majority of young people who end up NEET could have been identified as at risk in their earliest days at school. Children who are not school-ready at four or five carry that disadvantage throughout their school career and into adult life. Alan Milburn has been unsparing about what this means in practice: a young person who has been on benefits as a NEET for two years is likely to remain on benefits for life under our present system. The cumulative annual cost of youth economic inactivity is estimated at £125 billion. It is, as the Review makes clear, a bill the exchequer cannot afford and a waste of human potential that no civilised society should accept.
Many of the young performers who have gone through the conservatoires we heard at the Dean and Chadlington Festival this weekend came from private schools. That is not a reflection on them — their talent and dedication are beyond question. It is a reflection on a system that has allowed the pipeline from early musical education to professional performance to become the exclusive property of those whose parents can afford to pay for it. The creative industries contribute £126 billion a year to our economy. Britain leads the world in music, theatre, film, and the performing arts. And yet the clear majority of students at our conservatoires are privately educated, in a country where 93.7% of children attend state schools.
The pipeline to the conservatoires begins — and currently ends — in the state primary school classroom.
Act Three: The Vision Argument
What CATS is doing in 70 schools across Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire, with almost 13,000 children, is not conservatoire training. We are not producing the next Craig Ogden, or even Charlotte Du-Cann or Matthew Curtis — though among 13,000 children, some may yet surprise us. What we are doing is lighting a spark. We are giving children who have never heard live music performed, never held a paintbrush, never stood on a stage, the experience of discovering what they are capable of. We are showing them a world they did not know existed. For context, the government’s Every Child Can programme — its flagship enrichment initiative — offers £14.85 per child across five activity categories for all ages over the course of an entire parliament. CATS spends £26 to £40 per child per year on the arts alone.
The evidence is now overwhelming that an arts-rich primary education does far more than produce future performers. Children who learn in an arts-rich environment develop the creativity, the capacity for collaboration, the empathy, and the resilience that employers across every sector — including engineering, technology, and science — say they need and cannot find. There is compelling evidence that an arts education develops precisely the frame of mind that produces engineers and innovators, not just artists. The arts are not an alternative to preparing children for the modern economy. They are one of the most effective ways of doing so.
What the academic research also shows — and what we observe consistently across our partner schools — is that children who have an arts-rich environment overcome behavioural difficulties more readily, engage more fully with the rest of the curriculum, and attend school more reliably. Strip the arts out of the school day and focus exclusively on ‘reading, riting, and rithmetic’, and you produce children who are bored, who cannot focus, who do not want to come to school. Rising absenteeism and rising behavioural referrals are the predictable consequences of an impoverished curriculum — and they feed directly into the NEET statistics that so dismayed Amol Rajan on Saturday morning.
The young boy who stayed after the concert on Sunday to play the piano on which he had just heard such skilled performances had already been given the vision. Parents and teachers had shown him what music could be, and he had reached for it. Not every child will reach that far. Not every child will have the ambition to put in the years of work and dedication that the singers and pianists we heard this weekend have put in. But every child deserves to be shown what is possible.
You can only aspire to what you can imagine. You can only imagine what you have first been shown. You can only have ambition if you have first been given the vision.
