Bridget’s Blog: Reviewing the Year
20th January 2025
A New Year’s Eve party can seem a long evening when it feels as if the whole point is to wait up until midnight! To fill the time, as well as a meal and perhaps some games, there are usually the “What were your highlights of the past year?” conversations too. A review of the year is often helped by the newspapers and websites telling us the most noteworthy stories, achievements and of course the sad passing of great people. But what about our own year in review?
Thankfully at Music Mark we undertake a review of the year – albeit Academic – every autumn. It’s a great opportunity for us to remind ourselves about the work we’ve done; how we’ve supported the membership, the connections we’ve facilitated and made, and our influencing work. A highlight for me was giving evidence to the Education Select Committee in May – although the calling of a general election just two days later did perhaps dampen the impact of the evidence that I and others gave!
If you haven’t seen our Annual Review I would encourage you to do so!
Of course, looking back is interesting, but in doing so we should also reflect on the impact of our work. Music Mark ran 121 training sessions and events in the 2023/24 academic year. Reflecting that in my first year at Music Mark we probably ran about 6, this is a significant number! But what impact did these sessions have, and how were they received and valued?
Without feedback, we don’t know how well we’re doing and whether what we’re doing matches what’s needed by our members and the sector. Indeed I think it is especially important for us to evaluate what we do online – you can usually tell if something is going well (or not) when you run an event in person, but it isn’t quite as easy when it’s a webinar and you can’t actually see the participants!
We always welcome feedback at any time and if you’re reading this and have something you’d like to say about our work, or a great idea for some training or a resource, then do get in touch at any time by emailing us. However, over the last few years we have also requested feedback through our Annual Survey.
Last year we didn’t run the survey as there was so much significant upheaval in music education that we felt it was more important to focus on supporting that, rather than asking everyone to fill in a form. However, we’re currently working on the 2025 survey. We’ll be asking you to let us know what’s important to you, and how well Music Mark is doing to support you.
The survey will be shared in the spring, but as I said before, if you’ve been reviewing the year just gone and thinking about what you need to do in 2025 let us know. Can we help support you, connect you with others or use our influence in some way?
