Driving home from Newark, whither I had taken Auntie Barbara to catch her train to Hatfield for her school reunion, I heard a discussion on the radio about the importance of children spending part of every day singing and making music to help make them into rounded, relaxed people(which tied up with what Barbara had been telling me about great-grandsons Luke and Carter and their toddlers' music group).

It sounds wonderful - time set aside in every school day for joyous music making which has nothing to do with targets and all to do with enjoyment, but what about the teachers? If I just think about my two best friends, both of whom teach nursery (brave souls). Becky plays the piano competently and sings well; Liz doesn't. Now, I have no doubt that Liz can lead a rousing chorus of The Wheels on the Bus as happily as anyone and gives the children a great start, but to give children theraputic music on a daily basis you need a daily progression and a real love of music to impart to the children as well as a wide repertoire of tunes with which the children can sing along or to which they can bash their drums and rattle their maracas. Are there enough such people in the education system?

I'm all in favour of children singing every day: I owe my huge repertoire of hymns and carols to daily school assemblies throughout my childhood far more than to weekly church attendance for most of my life, and vast numbers of secular songs to Time and Tune and Singing Together on the radio and talented music teachers who took us year by year through the Oxford School Song Books.

I'm not a particularly musical person, but the pleasure of being able to sing (my pleasure rather than the listener's) song after song as I work or drive (yes, I am that nutter you see singing alone in the car) is enormous, and a gift which everyone deserves to be given. However, its does so much depend on the teacher. At my infant school it is clear to me now that there was no music specialist - nobody who had either the skill or the enthusiasm to impart a love of music making to us, and that weekly band and singing lessons were a duty which had to be done. At junior school we had a headmaster who was a star of the local operatic society, an odd little lady who taught recorder, and several class teachers who did swaps with other class teachers to share their musical expertise with all the classes so that from Monday's Singing Together, through recorder band, class singing and choir practice, to Friday's hymn practice we had music every day, as well as the two or three hymns in assembly each morning.

Both at the time, and even more from an adult perspective, I can pick a lot of faults with my primary schooling, but the music we were given in the four years of junior school was phenomenal, and was to an extent continued with Mrs Hutton at the grammar school, although, after her general approach in the first two years, music became more of a specialism reliant upon private lessons for progress in the orchestra or as a soloist with the choir.