News from Sistema Scotland: the first findings of the Glasgow Centre for Population Health’s long-term research project into the social impact on children’s lives, and the effect on their communities, of the Big Noise schemes in Stirling’s Raploch and Glasgow’s Govanhill, show positive outcomes across the board. These range from better school attendance to projected whole-life benefits for participants, such as greater community cohesion as well as economic gains over the medium and longer term. The high initial cost of delivering the scheme should be offset by the savings that are projected to accrue from longer-term improved health and educational outcomes.

It’s a tribute to Sistema Scotland’s political, as well as social, reach that the report’s findings are endorsed by Scotland’s culture minister Fiona Hyslop, who supports its “potential to transform lives and tackle inequalities”, although she stops short of recommending that it be rolled out across more than the three communities in which it will be working later this year (the project in Torry, in Aberdeen, will start in the summer).

The full report isn’t yet available online – we only have the Initial Findings Report to go on – but in the wake of Geoff Baker’s analysis of the Sistema phenomenon in Venezuela, there are a couple of caveats worth highlighting. The first is that arguably the most significant element of the research undertaken by Glasgow Caledonian University, its “health economic cost-benefit analysis”, employs a “method consistent with that used to estimate the social impact of El Sistema in Venezuela in 2007, by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)”. That IDB report, and subsequent reports on which the IDB has based its millions of dollars’ worth of support for El Sistema, according to Baker, have “multiple problems” and “serious issues around methodology”, including their “dubious cost-benefit calculation – estimated as a ratio of 1:1.68 … there is a strong likelihood that the figure is exaggerated, given that positive outcomes may well be the result of pre-existing social, economic or cognitive advantages.” In the absence of the full report, it’s impossible to know how the projected figures for Big Noise Govanhill’s 70-year benefits (£89.37m, according to the report) have been calculated, or how definite their analysis is – even if the report says that “for all scenarios analysed, the net present value of Big Noise Govanhill remained positive”.

Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti at Raploch Community Campus with children from Raploch’s Big Noise orchestra. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Under a heading, “People Change Lives”, it says:

A recurring theme across this evaluation is the emphasis Sistema Scotland places on the quality of the relationship between musician and participant. It is this quality of relationship that is so important to the theorised impact pathways … At a societal level, a challenging set of questions remain as to how this quality of relationship is conceptualised within policy, is represented and prioritised within funding criteria and structures and is planned for and implemented locally ... Finally, how can the quality of a relationship be satisfactorily measured or evaluated – and is this needed?”

To which the answer, surely, is – yes, it must be, above all, when those relationships are at the core of what Sistema Scotland is about, at a time when the institutional relationships between music educators and their pupils are under scrutiny as never before, and when the quality of those relationships is so crucial to this report’s own “theorised impact pathways”.

The positive impacts that these findings show in concrete terms of “higher school attendance” and “respite and protection to the most vulnerable” can only be positive for the participants and their communities. And, as Baker’s book suggested, Sistema Scotland’s situation is not the same as El Sistema in Venezuela, since the Big Noise projects have been conceived from the ground up as social, as well as musical, programmes, and understand how their work fits into the wider ecology of music provision in the country.

But the main objective of this research – showing evidence of how whole communities are meaningfully transformed by the scheme – remains elusive. It will take future decades of study, and of funding for the continuation of the Big Noise projects, to create a more complete and nuanced picture of Sistema Scotland’s real impact.

