We did quite a bit of folk in our music lessons, both at primary and secondary schools. And classical. And even occasionally rock...I recall our teacher being a bit bemused by the ending to Cream's "Badge" in one of our "bring your own records in" lessons.

Maybe I went to unusually enlightened schools, but I never felt I was being told that classical stuff was something that only "our betters" could understand. Or that "working class culture" was under-valued. My mother (who left school at 14 to become a mill girl) and my father (who didn't go to school after 11 , and became a window cleaner, miner and leatherworker in turn) were both members of the local Amateur Operatic Society, and my father often got lead roles based purely on his voice, rather than his social standing.

And if learning about Bessemer Converters, South American Pampas and Cornish tin mining had no immediate application to our lives, you could probably say the same for our music lessons. Not crucial to development of a vocation or profession! I for one am glad I learned to much about so many diverse topics at school, whether it was "useful" in later life or not.

And who knows what's going to turn out "useful"? I thought tensor calculus, fourier analysis and vector algebra were pretty abstract things when I learned them in maths, but I've spent a good portion of the last 35 years actually using them in productive work!!!