Getting Into Music Teaching: Experience Beats Qualifications
By Written by Peter McVeigh
Music teaching is one of the most reliable income streams for UK and Irish musicians. Experience counts for more than a certificate. Here's how to use it.
I've heard it more times than I can count.
The music career didn't quite work out the way they hoped, so they decided to go into teaching. A fallback. A plan B. Something stable with a pension at the end of it.
I understand the logic. I don't think it's the right approach, and I think it does a disservice to teaching, to students, and honestly to the person making that decision.
Teaching music well is a vocation. It'sn't a consolation prize.
The School to Uni to Classroom Pipeline
There's a particular path that a certain type of music teacher takes. They did well in school, studied music at university, got their PGCE or teaching qualification, and walked into a classroom. They've never played a gig that wasn't a recital. They've never composed a track for a brief with a deadline. They've never negotiated a booking, run a show, dealt with a promoter, managed a set that was running long, or experienced the specific anxiety of hearing your own music played back in a room full of people who don't know you made it.
For primary school, I'll be careful here. Teaching young children to love music, to feel rhythm, to engage with sound, that's a different skill set and a deep one. You don't need to have toured to help a seven-year-old discover that music matters to them.
But for further education, for higher education, for any context where you're teaching developing musicians who are trying to build careers, I think that pipeline produces teachers who are missing something fundamental.
What Experience Actually Gives You
When you've played live, you understand things that can't be taught from a textbook.
You understand what it feels like when a set isn't connecting and you've to adjust in real time. You understand the relationship between a performer and a room, how that relationship is built and how quickly it can be lost.
When you've composed music for a real context, with a real deadline and a real brief, you understand creative constraints in a way that no academic exercise replicates.
When you've arranged music for real musicians, you've had the humbling experience of writing something that looked right on paper and watching a player tell you it doesn't work. And then you've had to fix it.
When you've run shows, you know what production actually involves. You know how many things can go wrong between the idea and the event.
All of that experience is what you're passing on when you teach. Not just the knowledge. The texture of it.
Students Know the Difference
Developing musicians are perceptive in ways that sometimes surprise people.
They can tell when a teacher is working from theory rather than experience. They can tell when an answer to a question about the industry is coming from a book rather than from a room. They can tell when the person in front of them has been in the situations they're trying to prepare for, and when they'ven't.
The most valuable teaching tends to come from people who have both. The technical foundation of a good music education combined with the grounded reality of someone who has actually done the thing they're teaching.
When a teacher can say this is how I handled that situation, this is what I got wrong, this is what I'd do differently, that's a different quality of instruction than anything a curriculum document can produce.
Teaching as a Genuine Choice
Some of the best music teachers I've encountered made a deliberate decision to teach. Not because performing didn't work out. Because they discovered at some point that helping other people develop was genuinely fulfilling in a way that their own performing career wasn't.
That shift, from pursuing your own musical ambitions to investing seriously in someone else's, is a meaningful one. It requires a different set of motivations and a genuine interest in other people's growth rather than your own recognition.
The teachers who made that choice deliberately, with real experience behind them and genuine commitment to the role, tend to be the ones who leave a mark on their students. The ones whose names get mentioned in interviews ten years later.
If You're Thinking About Teaching
This is only my opinion and I hold it with some conviction.
If you want to teach music at further education or higher education level, go and do things first. Play live. Record properly. Compose for a brief. Arrange for real musicians. Run an event. Get rejected. Get booked. Do the thing before you teach the thing.
Not because you need to have been successful. You don't. Failure is at least as instructive as success, possibly more so. But you need to have tried. You need to have been in the situations your students are heading into, even if the outcome wasn't what you hoped for.
Bring that into the classroom. Not as a story you tell to sound interesting, but as a foundation.
Teaching isn't a fallback. For the right person, at the right point in their career, with the right experience behind them, it's one of the most valuable things anyone in music can do.