We have prioritised technical excellence and expert guidance in music education for a long time, particularly in the competition-centric world of piping. If we can enhance the sound, tighten the corps, or improve the group’s technique, then confidence, success, and cohesion will follow. Often, our solution to improving these areas is to apply more expertise, perhaps through better tuition or even pressure.  

But what if we stepped back and looked at this sequence from a different angle.

At the National Piping Centre (NPC), where I started working with the National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland (NYPBS) we found ourselves grappling with this question. Despite an experienced team of tutors, with world-class pipe band experience and a cohort of talented young players, something wasn’t quite working. There was a stiffness in the air we couldn’t quite shake, a nervousness behind the jokes and bravado. 

Despite our best efforts, the programme wasn’t producing the energy, cohesion or creativity we hoped for.

The answer, it turned out, wasn’t more teaching. It was something else entirely: facilitation.

Teaching, in the traditional sense, is a transactional model: the transfer of knowledge from expert to learner. And when done well, it is powerful. I was incredibly lucky growing up: I not only had access to excellent tuition in Piping but also had some truly inspiring piano teachers and classroom music teachers. I was exposed to a varied array of teaching techniques and philosophies, from my strict Russian classical piano teacher to Suzuki, to military-informed Piping tuition and Finlay MacDonald’s exploratory style at NPC. 

I also crossed paths with some bad teachers, as we all do, along the way. The ones who lecture but don’t listen, who crush curiosity instead of igniting it, and I learned a lot from them too, on what to avoid. 

By the time I was teaching in schools and youth music projects myself, I’d developed my own style, distilled from everything I’d experienced. The most important lesson came from watching young people figure out how music could fit into their lives. Not all of them wanted to join a band or become professional musicians, and my role was to help them find their own voice and develop new skills. Working as an instrumental tutor for me was about serving each individual and helping them figure out how Piping could fit into and enrich their life, or not. This was much more interesting to me than ‘building a band’.  

However, I did see the benefits of group music-making, and I began to gravitate more toward larger group projects with young people, eventually becoming the musical director of the Gordon Duncan Experience. 

When I joined the NYPBS, I was excited to apply my experience and join the team to learn more. But despite everyone’s hard work and good intentions, I encountered a culture that was fragmented. Compartmentalisation—by section, by background, by experience—was the norm. Everyone carried themselves with a surface-level swagger but lacked real confidence in themselves and the ensemble. There was a lot of fear and judgment. And not nearly enough joy or trust.

Particularly in ensemble contexts, technical knowledge alone isn’t enough to build trust, cohesion, or ownership amongst the group. You can know how to play the piece. But that doesn’t mean you’ll know how to realise it together. This was not something we were going to be able to teach our way out of or conquer through stoic discipline and demanding standards. 

Around the same time, we launched our Weekend Piping Club led by the brilliant Ailis Sutherland, an NYPBS Alum. The WPC, in theory, caters to all levels, but at its inception, it was aimed at providing accessible, supportive group tuition to pipers at a much earlier stage than NYPBS. She was coming up against some of the same issues, manifested in that very different context. 

This is not a unique problem in youth music. It mirrors a broader structural reality in education and youth policy: too much focus on delivery, and not enough on connection.

The turning point came in the form of Lisa Meech, a young music facilitator whose practice centres not on the transmission of knowledge, but on the creation of inclusive, participatory environments. Lisa joined our Mackay’s Memoirs project in 2023 and introduced our team to a different way of thinking.

Her focus was not on what tutors knew, but on how they created space. Games, warm-ups, physical exercises, open-ended questions—tools not to simplify the work, but to humanise it. 

All of this was neatly summarised as facilitation. This gave us the clarity to discuss and address these areas we wanted to improve across our work and the more we talked about facilitation the more we learned, experimented and implemented. 

Lisa’s input was so valuable that we began implementing the training she provided across our programme. 

Crucially, we embedded it in our tutor training and we watched something remarkable happen. Trainees who had previously struggled with confidence began to thrive. Young people became more expressive, more cooperative, and more willing to take creative risks. And the standard of musical execution didn’t drop; it rose.

Facilitation does not replace tuition; it compliments it. It enabless the knowledge shared through tuition to be owned, applied and expanded. As Zahra Tarek writes, “Teaching adds new knowledge. Facilitation connects that knowledge to experience.”

Isabella Gonzalez Diaz was one of the Trainees in our Mackay’s project, who since worked with us as a facilitator. 

Isabella was helping to coordinate one of our audition workshops last year. We had delayed recruiting our drumming trainee tutors, which meant this was their first day and they hadn’t received training in facilitation yet. A couple of  hours into the workshop the bass section were really struggling. Our team were spread particularly thin that day and we asked Isabella to step in and support the tenor drummers until we could free up an experienced tenor tutor. 

Isabella is not a pipe band drummer or even a percussionist but within an hour the bass section was up and running, having fun and performing confidently with the full group. 

What made the difference was not technical mastery of tenor drumming. It was her ability to generate trust, focus the group, and create space for agency. The success of the section came not from being told what to do, but from being given the structure and encouragement to do it together.

There are important implications here, not only for youth music but for youth learning more broadly.

In systems that still prioritise measurable attainment, group cohesion, collaboration and creative ownership can be seen as secondary. Yet, particularly in community and cultural settings, they are what turn participation into transformation.

Facilitation may sound like a soft skill. But in practise it demands clarity of purpose, adaptability, and an awareness of power dynamics. It requires leaders to relinquish a degree of control in order to support the growth of the group. And it works.

For NYPBS and our Weekend Piping Club, facilitation is no longer an afterthought—it is a central part of our pedagogy. It’s how we build confidence. It’s how we ensure access. It’s how we make music a truly collective and impactful experience.

As debate continues around the future of creative education, inclusion in the Arts, and youth mental health, there is an opportunity here for policymakers, funders, and practitioners to take facilitation seriously. It could be the foundation for a more relevant, more equitable, and ultimately more effective model of learning.

The question for organisations, educators and funders alike is:
 Are we just teaching or are we enabling young people to take the lead?

If you’re an individual working in education, the arts, youth work, or any kind of team: how much of what you’re doing is teaching and how much is facilitating?

What would happen if you made more space for people to discover, not just absorb?

For us, it has made all the difference.