Summer Greetings from the Principals

We are about to leave behind a school year with a great anniversary celebration and many other steady and good activities in the house and elsewhere.

We have also had to endure the harsh restructuring measures from 2023, which have cost us. We want to thank everyone again for their efforts to save; it has been helpful! Expenditures at NMH have gone down, and together with, among other things, good salary and price growth compensation and lower electricity bills than expected, we have managed to cope with a very challenging economic situation.

Operation at the Music Academy will be more normalized at the start of the next academic year, and we are pleased to add a few new resources in strategically important areas, such as class hours, TUP, and R&D.

Before the restructuring, we had a system with extra resources for class hours, i.e., group teaching on the main instrument and some instruments in classical study directions. They have been practised in slightly different ways and have been unevenly distributed.

This spring, we reviewed these resources and created a new model. Here, string and wind instruments, as well as piano and singing, on classical get a class hour resource based on the number of students. Harp, accordion, guitar, organ, and percussion retain their fixed forum resource. In addition, the so-called "year class hours" across instruments on jazz are reintroduced.

This means a slight increase in resources for class hours. In addition, we have given more to accompaniment, among other things, to support class hours and forums. All of this is in line with the prioritized measure under point 4, "Culture for interaction", in the annual plan for 2024: – Maintain working environment, academic and administrative quality in a time characterized by economic restructuring, with a particular focus on orientation, evaluation and development of main instrument and group teaching in performing/creative subjects.

In conversations with external partners and academic environments internally at NMH about the new strategy, many point out that we must expect to work even more offensively with recruitment to higher music education in the years to come. At the same time, we see that last year's savings measures have hit our talent development program (TUP) hard.

NMH receives an earmarked grant from the state budget for talent development. In the years before the critical budget situation arose, NMH contributed by self-paying approximately 25% of the total budget for TUP to administration and more. This self-payment was cut as part of the restructuring. The cut reduced the number of gatherings from 12 to 10 and significantly reduced the number of students who received one-to-one teaching.

During the year, we have noticed a larger drop-out of students than usual, and all academic environments report that running a broad talent development program within the new economic framework is challenging. As a strategic move, we, therefore, chose to reverse the cuts to TUP for the coming academic year to again get 12 annual gatherings and good student coverage across all instrument groups.

At the same time, we will evaluate TUP to determine whether the program is "properly rigged" to increase the undergrowth of young musicians who want to pursue higher music education.

Part of the savings in 2023 was also decreased resources for research and artistic development work. There was less in the pot for extra R&D for teachers, and no PhD positions were announced in the scientific program. In 2024, we are back to normal, and there will be even more in both areas. Because we received funds that would otherwise have been in the Program for Artistic Development Work directly to NMH, we have now been able to allocate a little more to extra R&D and have admitted a record number of PhD students. In addition, a postdoctoral position in artistic development work will soon be announced.

The work with the strategy also continues, with a seminar with the board, middle managers and union representatives on June 6-7 and at the staff assembly on August 22. We want to thank you for many inspiring conversations and inputs during the spring and look forward to more discussions as the strategy takes a more concrete form in the future.

• We also hope to meet at the end-of-semester on Friday, June 14!