A Throwback to Years Gone By from the Government

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Athene Donald

Back in 2019 the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Advertising Standards Authority published new guidelines about the problems of gender stereotyping in advertising. The guidelines are clear: ‘These rules state that ads ‘must not include gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence’. A wide variety of ads since then have fallen foul of the rules and have been banned. Unfortunately, the Government seems unaware of any of this, and managed to produce a spectacular own goal of a poster on social media, which produced howls of derision and anger.

Gov ad

The first image of these four seems simply homely, and of course it is entirely reasonable that a woman holds a baby, reads a book with her children or does some cleaning, as long as a) that is not all she does – why is she not on a Zoom call or reading a novel – and b) the man is equally expected to be pulling his domestic weight. In these last three images men are simply absent. Are the boys down the park playing football and the men headed off to the pub, breaking all the guidelines? Have they been too keen on being strong men, like the Dominic Cummings of this world, and run off to test their eyes? That somehow the men and boys are allowed out, while the women stay at home with the kids?

It seems extraordinary that the gender stereotypes implied by these images were invisible to the layers of designers, checkers and signers-off who must have let this image pass all the stages of production. Did no one (male or female) stop to think how unsuitable these were. We all need to stay home, pull our weight in the challenges of domestic lockdown and think about the NHS. Why should men be somehow absent from the daily life of the home. The poster is as insulting to the man who is getting on with the cleaning, the childcare or the colicky-baby-holding, as to the woman who sees, yet again, her role in society reduced to domestic slave. The world has moved on. Most of us may currently not be worrying about power-dressing (at least from the waist down), or running late for the train, but men and women will be juggling the competing tensions of home and work while struggling to find a place to Zoom quietly for that call with the boss.

Unfortunately, that advertisement says a lot about attitudes to society in the present political leadership. The current minister for Women and Equalities is Liz Truss, and it is a subsidiary role to her primary focus as Secretary of State for International Trade. I tried to recall what pronouncements I recall her making on these subjects, and failed. I did remember her making some fairly (and probably overly) optimistic comments about a trade deal with Japan towards the end of last year. But have I heard  her talking about the challenges facing ethnic minorities due to their higher death rates from Covid19, or worrying about the consequences of lockdown for those trapped in a small dwelling with an abuser? Well, no. Or has she spoken up about the financial consequences for women whose juggling has been too much for them, and they have lost their job? Not a sound that I recall. So I did a quick Google to see what I had missed, but that didn’t throw up much relevant to this post.

We should not be leaving it to the Fawcett Society or the wider Twitter world to scream about the inappropriateness of an official communication. Its message is important and should be heeded by us all. But to let the artwork destroy that message by stupidity, blindness and laziness is a shocker.

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DfE Deluge

Posted on January 23, 2021 by Athene Donald

As has been noted by many this week, there has been a deluge of output from the Department for Education (DfE), covering many matters that have been in the offing for months if not years. That the response to the Pearce Review on the Teaching Excellence Framework has been published with August 2019 on the cover is amusing, but it also says a lot about the way these issues are being tackled: non-urgently.

Since August 2019, of course, there has been a substantial reorganisation in ministerial responsibilities, and DfE has now absorbed the higher education agenda to sit alongside the 5-18 education it has always dealt with, removing it from BEIS (Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). Unifying all education in one Department might have been hoped to improve coherence, but it is clear that communications from the education and skills arena through to the utilisation of those skills in our businesses is woefully inadequate between these two departments. We definitely need a skilled workforce at all levels suitable to ‘build back better’ as the Government has promised, and to improve our economic output and overall productivity. However, as Richard Jones has pointed out in a series of tweets, joined-up thinking does not seem the Government’s strong point in this space, and the various documents pouring out of DfE seem to confirm that. Furthermore, the gulf between DfE and BEIS is not of new standing; it was palpable ten years ago, when HE still sat in (then) BIS. It mattered then and it matters now.

Richard tweets

The response to the Augar Review isn’t really a response; it runs to a mere 13 pages in total and kicks the answers to the big questions about funding for which universities have been waiting anxiously into the long grass of the next Comprehensive Spending Review. All we know is there is a freeze on the fees’ cap. At the heart of the Augar Review was concern about the multiplicity of non-degree courses on offer, to the confusion of employer and potential student alike, and the poor funding situation, both for colleges and for students. There are some glimmers of hope about the latter, such as the Lifetimes Skills Guarantee, permitting from April 2021, any adult who wants to achieve a first full level 3 qualification (for instance a couple of A levels or BTecs), free access, paid for through the National Skills Fund. However, this is not new news, having been promised during the autumn. The more extensive (up to four years funding) Lifelong Loan Entitlement, meaning loans will be available for Level 4 and 5 qualifications on a par with loans for degree study, will not kick in till 2025 – NB another Parliament – and has not been approved by the Treasury. Quite an obstacle.

The most substantial of this week’s DfE output is the White Paper ‘Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth’.  Jobs….you might have thought BEIS would want –and be allowed – to put  some input into this; this is precisely where joined-up thinking is so crucial. However, a reading of the paper suggests this has not happened. Employers are most certainly mentioned and given a central role:

Employers will also be put at the heart of identifying skills needs and helping to shape local provision through close working with colleges and other providers; we will make strategic development funding available to colleges to support this.

However, exactly what this means is less than clear. As Andy Westwood has pointed out, employers are not exactly a homogeneous bunch and the larger employers in the more productive sectors are already likely to be involved more seriously with training and skills than those others in low-pay, low productivity fields. To lift people out of these low-skilled jobs, and to drive productivity more generally, one probably shouldn’t be relying on the latter class of employers to drive change or construct courses of an appropriate and well-understood standard. More courses, particularly if as a non-standard qualification, may only enhance confusion rather than subsequent productivity.

An interesting word in the above quote is ‘local’, presumably a nod to the much discussed (if not-so-apparent) levelling-up agenda. Of course, different parts of the country will have different needs: Hull has a thriving wind energy ecosystem, but Swindon less so, and so on. However, how specific are these new courses in the colleges going to be? For many employees currently under-skilled, there are a swathe of possible options and limited guidance as to what will help. If courses get too specific, then they will be less overall useful as life progresses, whereas some courses, such as basic digital skills, will be broadly helpful for almost all jobs.

There are undoubtedly areas where there have been long-standing shortages in supply of well-qualified job applicants, as the Augar Review highlighted. Given a persistent shortfall in areas such as construction, health and information technology, one has to wonder whether this new White Paper will lead to any significant change in supply given that all prior attempts have failed. It has to be faced, there has been an long line  of attempts to reform this section of the education and training system, as spelled out in grim detail here. One has to wonder whether this latest attempt is any more likely to be successful, particularly if the Treasury isn’t fully behind it, as Andy Westwood argues.

There is one final black humour aspect to this group of papers, touching upon the levelling up agenda once more. Except, that it would appear DfE is more interested in levelling down. The Secretary of State’s letter to the Office for Students setting out next year’s teaching grant and funding priorities, savagely cut the small remaining sums directed towards teaching in subjects such as art and design, music and drama, but also removed the London weighting that the capital has enjoyed for so long. Consequently, all regions outside London see a small increase in their teaching grant, but London loses nearly 14%. This is one way of making sure there is a more even distribution of funding to make regions closer to level, but it hardly fits with the message of ‘levelling up’. Another indication of how thinking is not joined up.

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Are Journal Editors Biased?

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Athene Donald

Last week a paper by Squazzoni et al appeared, which had analysed submissions to 145 scholarly journals to look for gender bias in acceptances and across the whole editorial process. They claimed not to find it. When I saw the headline I was puzzled. A careful analysis of their own publications by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2019 had found significant evidence of bias across their editorial process, as I wrote about previously. Why the difference? Was this latest study different because it looked across multiple journals and disciplines, not just chemistry? Or was it different because the data they had access to provided less insight? My conclusion is the latter interpretation is correct. This recent study made some assumptions about where the problems might lie and focussed fairly narrowly there.

Squazzoni et al claim in their conclusion that

‘peer review and editorial processes do not penalise manuscripts by women’

and that, in some fields,

‘manuscripts written by women as solo authors or co-authored by women were treated even more favourably by referees and editors’.

This conclusion seems solely to be based on the fact that the acceptance rates were, in some cases, slightly higher for women than for men. Unfortunately, they excluded some key steps and issues in their study, presumably in part because they didn’t have access to them and in part because they didn’t fit the hypotheses they were aiming to test:

‘We concentrated on three possible sources of bias, i.e., the editorial selection of referees, referee recommendations, and editorial decisions, and examined all their possible relationships while controlling for important con­founding factors such as journals’ field of research, impact factor, and single­ versus double­blind peer review.’

So, they concentrated on some topics to the exclusion of others. The first step in the review process – did the editor even send the paper out for review, a huge gatekeeping event – was not explored at all. Yet, certainly for the highest impact factor journals such as Nature, this step is absolutely crucial. Many papers are simply rejected out of hand – but which ones and by whom? To conclude that editors treated women more favourably, at least in some cases, when this first hurdle is totally ignored seems somewhat naïve. Particularly so, when there is already evidence that this step has a detrimental effect. The RSC report states

‘we found that initial submissions from female corresponding and first authors are more likely to be rejected without peer review….’.

By excluding the challenge of this very first step, the recent study has to be regarded of dubious use as evidence that editors do not exhibit bias.

Another issue that neither they nor, indeed, the RSC considered was the length of the review process or how many revisions were requested before acceptance (or indeed rejection). Again, one can see how easily subtle bias can creep in here. For instance, if a male corresponding (or first) author is more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt on first submission when a similar woman is not but instead revisions demanded, then there will be a consequent delay for the woman. Tying in with this concern are the results of a study of NIH grant holders from a couple of years ago which looked at how men and women react to feedback about grant applications; it is hard to see why the conclusions should differ when it comes to referees’ comments. Their conclusion was

‘that gender bias in grant reviews (i.e., greater likelihood of highlighting inadequacy in reviews of women’s grants), along with gender differences in responsiveness to feedback, may contribute to women’s underrepresentation in academic medicine’.

It seems to me that referees’ comments about a manuscript are likely to have the same dampening effect on a woman’s motivation, confidence and hence career progression as comments about a grant application as this study demonstrated.

As yet another study showed, inappropriate referee comments are common, but are likely to have a much more damaging impact on minorities. These authors specifically identified that

‘future studies should test if receiving an unprofessional peer review leads to different acceptance outcomes depending on gender and/or race/ethnicity.’

but, as far as I know this has not been done anywhere.  If an editor reads a negative review – however unwarranted – arising from gender bias, then they are more likely to require women to resubmit their manuscript than a comparable man. Receiving this more negative feedback because of bias in a referee, or being expected to go through multiple revisions because of how the editor reacts, will inevitably be disheartening, with the likely consequence that the discouragement will feed through into subsequent behaviour, even if ultimately the paper is accepted. Just looking at the crude statistics of acceptance is insufficient – as this most recent paper does – and may mask one of the subtle reasons why women are less likely to submit manuscripts, particularly to what are perceived as the ‘top’ journals.

Finally, it is inadequate to imagine that by seeking out more women referees the problem will be solved. As Melinda Duer and I wrote in the THE in early 2019,

“It is not just men who are biased against women; so too are women, as a 2012 study of job applications published in PNAS showed. So increasing the number of women in the reviewer pool, while giving more women useful experience, is unlikely to affect the number of female-authored papers accepted. Nor, correspondingly, is having more women on the editorial team of the journals.”

Nevertheless, this Squazzoni’s paper is enthusiastic about expanding the number of female referees and editorial board members (which may not be the ‘best’ use of any particular woman’s time), under the belief that then women will be more likely to submit manuscripts and participate more generally. To quote their abstract

‘However, increasing gender diversity in editorial teams and referee pools could help journals inform potential authors about their attention to these factors and so stimulate participation by women.’

This looks to me like a fig leaf, and smacks of fixing the women not the system. If women suspect there is bias in the process they may be right (as the RSC report shows).

For all these different reasons, I am not convinced by this study. It worries me that the paper will provide grist to those who want to believe the conclusions about a lack of bias in the editorial process, implicitly blaming women who are simply not able to ‘man up’ sufficiently, without thinking deeply about what the evidence actually demonstrates.

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Rethinking Qualifications? It’s About Time

Posted on January 8, 2021 by Athene Donald

For the second year running our school assessment system is up in the air, for totally understandable reasons. A Levels were explicitly cancelled but the Government seemed incapable of giving a clear answer about this month’s BTec’s, the vocational equivalent. Leaving decisions about whether the imminent exams should go ahead to individual schools was a clear failure of leadership, putting both those sitting the exams and the schools in an invidious position. It is, perhaps, only too typical of attitudes towards anything other than the so-called Gold standard of A levels.

If you read David Goodhart’s book Head Hand Heart (about which I may have more to say in a subsequent post), it is obvious he believes we completely undervalue skills other than those of the head, those exemplified by A Levels and degrees. Approaching the issue from a different perspective, not least in political persuasion, in David Sainsbury’s book Windows of Opportunity, there is a similar conviction that, as a country, we let down those students for whom university is not an option, or at least not the right one for them. For both these authors, there is a clear belief that not only individuals are not well served by the current system, neither is civil society nor the economy. In other words, for the nation too getting this right really matters.

Sainsbury, the former Science Minister under Tony Blair, spends some time in his book discussing the lack of coherence in our current educational system across the different potential pathways. He considers this not least in the context of the implications for the technical support, so vital in both industry and university laboratories. With the dire consequences of Brexit for supply chains as well as for the flow of non-UK workers, both (amongst many other detrimental consequences) immensely damaging for industry as the deal has been configured, the need for these home-grown skilled workers at sub-degree level will become ever more acute.

Not that long ago, Charles Clarke – Secretary of State for Education also in Blair’s Government – admitted to me that his greatest regret as Education Secretary was the failure to implement the recommendations of the 2004 Tomlinson Report. This advocated a comprehensive rethink of school qualifications to create a single, unified diploma covering all levels of ability. As he said, when presenting this Report to Parliament, it would take time to put such a scheme in place but thereby

“all existing academic and vocational qualifications would be brought within its [the diploma’s] framework…. It would establish a single coherent, understood qualifications framework for the first time. It would put vocational and academic qualifications on a common footing, again for the first time.”

He endorsed it at the time, but there seems subsequently to have been a collective loss of nerve about introducing something that might destroy the (in)famous A Levels and such a diploma never came into being.

So, a decade and a half later, we still have A Levels along with an ill-assorted collection of other qualifications, including the BTec’s and the still-being-rolled-out T-Levels, not to mention apprenticeships. These diverse qualifications are typically not well understood by either students (and their parents) or employers, leading to confusion and inadequate matching of skills and needs. Typically, they are also under-resourced, a point well made in the Augar Review, now more than 18 months old and still awaiting a formal Government response.

In the parlance, BTec’s and the rest are Levels 4/5 qualifications and, unlike many other countries, notably Germany, we have a lack of workers for whom this is their highest level qualification. We are well-served with graduates, but far too many individuals do not progress beyond Levels 2 and 3(GCSE), hence providing inadequate skilled and semi-skilled workers to fill crucial roles. Sainsbury is so exercised about these issues, the educational research trust he funds – the Gatsby Foundation – has directed significant effort to investigating the problems in what their reports  term ‘The Missing Middle’ (see here and here). His book likewise looks in some detail at the problems our current system provokes. Of the inchoate range of qualifications he says

“If there is a vast range of qualifications, and the acquisition of them is not valued by employees – either because they don’t know what skills the people with these qualifications have, or because they don’t value the ones they do acquire ­– then people won’t be motivated to get the qualifications.’ And he refers to the fact that this multiplicity of qualifications  ‘do not work in the marketplace, and produce variable and usually poor standards of education and training.”

Under-resourcing and complexity together deliver this unsatisfactory state of affairs.

The UK has a long track record of failing to think through technical training adequately. It started with the opening up of elementary education for all children in Victorian times, when those devising curricula seemed unable to consider these issues, seeing children as either going on to become servants and mill-workers, albeit literate ones, or heading for university and requiring a gentleman’s classical education. It continued with the 1944 Butler Act, which advocated three streams of schools – grammar, secondary modern and technical – the third of which essentially never got built. My generation were simply divided into two, very unequal parts, with the vast majority being condemned to (again) under-resourced secondary moderns.

And it persists today: the UK has failed to work out how to deliver appropriate education for those who could make an important contribution to society and productivity (not to mention to their own sense of self-worth) without acquiring a degree. As the Augar Review pointed out

‘‘In England, only 4 per cent of 25 year-olds hold a Level 4 or Level 5 qualification as their highest level, compared to nearly 30 per cent for both Level 3 and Level 6. In contrast, in Germany, Level 4 and 5 makes up 20 per cent of all higher education enrolments.”

Looking at the state of German and UK industry, the success of the Mittelstand companies, it is worth the Government thinking about these figures very hard.

While we continue waiting for any sign of a formal response to the Augar Review, as we see those nominal gold standard qualifications (not to mention all the others) run into pandemic turmoil, as we reap the alleged benefits of a Brexit that was never going to transform our economy in a good direction, wouldn’t it be a good moment to think deeply about what spectrum of qualifications we need to sustain our economy and how they can be delivered, in a way that works for all, student and employer alike? As the public watch the unedifying picture of a bumbling Secretary of State making bad decisions, or U-turns always too late, with schools thrown into unending upheaval and consequent stress, some radical rethinking to create a coherent system with benefits all round seems called for. Maybe there is no way could it be delivered until after a significant period of stability in all our lives, it could nevertheless provide some optimism for the future.

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A Playlist for Troubled Times

Posted on January 2, 2021 by Athene Donald

During the recent weeks and months of staring at a screen, when there is little variety of scenery or (physical) company, I have found music a comforting companion. When I say music, I mean classical music which has been a frequent backdrop to my life of the pandemic. Listening to Joyce DiDonato’s own choice of playlist of ‘New Year cheer’ on BBC Radio3’s Inside Music this weekend, and the importance she attributed to Nature as, if you like, life-affirming during these pandemic days, I thought of the choices I would make myself to lift my spirits, Nature-related or not.

You should realise I’ve had public opportunities to choose playlists before, but with different purposes, not simply to lift my spirits. The first time was the most scary: Desert Island Discs, with its huge audience (and ongoing availability). My choices then were determined by pieces that had impacted on my life, with a personal story attached to each. With the exception of some barbershop music, it was entirely classical which seems to have caused some sniffiness in some quarters (what, no Bob Dylan?). Then, some years later I was asked to do Essential Classics (the podcast of which doesn’t seem still to be on BBC Sounds, but inevitably was also all classical), with the choices dictated by a series of questions they asked. For instance ‘What was the first classical record/CD you bought yourself’, to which the answer was Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater having sung it at school. Finally, and scary in a different way, was Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions, because – although I think of it as the classical equivalent of Desert Island Discs but with less potentially embarrassing probing about one’s personal life – it requires more ability to talk sensibly about the actual music as opposed to what it stands for in one’s life. Choices were therefore going to be dictated by wishing to have a spread of music genres (albeit still classical), but also ones I could defend, as it were.  I think I survived, but I do know of at least one very public figure who will not participate because of their lack of confidence about their musical competence, and I can understand why.

If your taste in music is grunge, garage, punk or heavy metal, this post may not be for you, but what follows is my playlist for troubled times and why I’ve chosen it.

Let’s start with a few pieces around the theme of Nature (as with DiDinato), beginning with a couple involving swans, but not the famous piece by Saint Saens written for double bass.

1 Jean Sibelius 5th Symphony. Sibelius is not to everyone’s taste, but the French horn motif in the final movement is supposed to have been inspired by watching whooper swans in flight. I have always thought of the motif as this beauty of flying swans with outspread oscillating wings, although I have seen it described as meant to mimic the call of the swans (I’ve never heard a whooper call, though I have occasionally seen them wintering in the UK, so I can’t readily comment on any mimicry.). To me, it is an uplifting movement, with a sense of purpose but also continuity and endurance. Definitely all things we need to hold on to right now.

2 Cantus Arcticus, a Concerto for birds and orchestra by another Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara, again with its final movement (Swans Migrating) also celebrating whooper swans. This is a piece of music that has only recently crossed my path, and what makes it so special is the overlaying of recordings of the cries of birds, including the swans, on top of the orchestral music . It is a magnificent, haunting combination. Stuck as I am in Cambridge (although not close enough to the flooded Ouse Washes to go and look for the whoopers), the implicit wildness appeals and cheers.

3 Ma Vlast, and specifically Vltava, also known by its English name The Moldau, the river that flows through Prague, by Bedřich Smetana. This movement beautifully conveys the fizzing eddies of fast flowing water. I learned years ago, when working in my gap year in the Lake District, how much I found staring at tumbling water soothing. Sadly, the Cam in Cambridge is a staid and boring river, the only turbulence to be found at the locks. I’ve tried watching the churning foam there, but it tends to be full of rubbish including the odd shopping trolley, and it doesn’t have at all the same effect. Staring at my local river does nothing for my soul, so I will have to make do with this musical evocation.

4 Fingal’s Cave, also known as The Hebrides Overture, by Felix Mendelssohn. A river anyhow is but a poor relation of a wild sea. Staring at the waves crashing on a beach or rocky promontory – or washing in and out of a cave – is even more satisfying to me than a tumbling beck or waterfall. Fingal’s Cave represents this par excellence. Sadly, not only is Cambridge located on a very unexciting river, it’s almost as far from any beach as anywhere can be in England. There can be no nipping off for some calming sea-watching in these uncalm days. I last saw the sea almost a year ago, and that is far, far too long. So, in the meantime, some musical images to conjure up the sensations are required. I could have chosen Storm from the Sea Interludes from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes or Elgar’s Sea Pictures, which is more restful – all have their place in my playlist for watery memories. Indeed, I suspect I could construct an entire playlist based on music associated with water.

5 The Spring Sonata, for violin and piano, by Ludwig van Beethoven. While we wait for both the literal spring and the metaphorical vaccine-induced spring to arrive, this is a piece of music to make one smile and feel full of the energy I’m sure many of us feel we’ve lost, or at least mislaid. A feel-good piece, its name is, however, not due to Beethoven, so perhaps one should treat its place in Nature’s firmament with some circumspection. It therefore serves as an excellent bridge to the less programmatic music on my playlist. I may say DiDonato chose Gustav Mahler’s 3rd symphony to evoke the ideas of birds and mountains. It may shock some of my readers to know, but Mahler and I don’t mix; never would he appear on any playlist of mine.

6 Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Given that the whole work runs to just under three hours, if I simply wanted quick refreshment, the last chorus is an obvious choice. Bach, of course, was deeply devout. Based on this alone, it clearly isn’t true that ‘the devil has all the best tunes’, a view that seems to have originated with 18th century Methodists. For Bach, his faith was central to the music he wrote. However, one doesn’t have to be religious to be uplifted by the music and, on this list, I could have happily placed a range of different religious music to give me that boost: Bach’s B Minor Mass, Mozart’s C Minor Mass and his Requiem, or Verdi’s Requiem  or Brahms Deutsches Requiem. The Dies Irae in the Verdi is enough to wake anyone up if they’re feeling down and out. These are all works I have sung and been moved by, all stirring strong memories of better times. (Although, to be honest, the performance of the B Minor was definitely substandard, with a second tier and under-rehearsed grouping, even if the setting was the magnificent Wren church of St James’ Piccadilly.)

7 The Vespers of 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi, always known colloquially in my family as the Montevespers, but more formally known as the Vespro della Beata Vergine. When I was a teenager this relatively early music was suddenly creating waves, and period instruments were beginning to be used. In my first term as an undergraduate, being a female undergraduate at a time when we represented less than 10% of the student population, we were in great demand to sing in the (men’s) college choirs, and therefore had the pick of them. I was delighted to spot early on that Christ’s College were planning on singing these Vespers and immediately signed up. They are totally distinct from the other, later masses and requiems I’ve identified, not least in their startlingly different accompaniment by brass and strings plus organ rather than a full orchestra, and ten soloists. Designed for a church where soloists could be placed away from the main choir to give effects of echo and dialogue, it still strikes me as a work like no other. A brassy boost to stimulate me.

8 Staying with a small group of instruments, next up is Antonin Dvorak’s 2nd Piano Quintet. Although I’d always been familiar with the symphonies (one of my earliest concert memories is of Dvorak’s New World Symphony in London’s Central Hall when I was still at primary school) I came to his delicate smaller scale works much later. I love this quintet which, like Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, feels ebullient and outgoing. Just the thing for a dark winter’s day.

9 Johannes Brahms String Sextet No 1 in B flat major is another chamber work, but more sombre and mellifluous than bouncy. As a former viola player, I respond to the texture of having two violas giving depth in the middle register. I have something of a love-hate relationship with Brahms, possibly the after-effect of attempting to play one of his clarinet sonatas (transcribed for viola) and failing to understand it musically at all, but – as with the Deutsches Requiem and this (and the second sextet too) ­– some of his music strikes me as sublime. Thoughtful, calming and equally a good listen for these short days when sombre and mellifluous can seem a good combination.

10 Symphony No 5 by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I was brought up in a family where Vaughan Williams was regarded with huge admiration, by a mother and grandmother who had sung with him in the the Three Choirs Festival, but for whom wider English music was also part of their bread and butter: Elgar, Butterworth, Parry, Holst and so on. My playlist has to include some of this sort of music. I toyed with including Elgar’s Overture Cockaigne, a perky piece I equate with the street sellers’ scene in Lionel Bart’s Oliver, but in the end went for something allegedly more pastoral. For all the sense of a countryside idyll, this symphony was written in the run up to the Second World War. It was, perhaps, written as a seeking for peace and hope, when times were bad, so it seems an appropriate final choice in this list.

My choice of music is obviously idiosyncratic, based on my musical experiences as well as the rest of my life, but thinking positively about the joy that music can bring, whatever your taste or preferred idiom, seems a constructive thing to do while waiting for vaccine roll out and an ultimate defeat of the scourge of Covid19. May you find peace as 2021 gets under way.

 

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