Pre-service music training at primary school: challenges and perspectives

The current Spanish regulatory situation is going through a period of uncertainty derived from the proposals for improvement to reform university education approved in Royal Decree 822/2021. While awaiting the publication of the development orders that should provide the necessary bases to establish a more up-to-date professional career in line with the educational challenges present in society, this article focuses on showing the current situation in the training of Primary School teachers with a mention in Music, and the challenges they have to face to gain access to this speciality of the Primary School Teacher Corps. For this purpose, through a descriptive study, different aspects of the profile, access grades, graduation rate and opinion about their initial training were analysed in a sample of 128 students who studied this specialisation at the Faculty of Education of the Complutense University of Madrid. The most notable results revealed that the students do not think that they have acquired a high level of training in both disciplinary content and didactic application, such as music and dance, or the use of digital resources. The most obvious conclusion of this study highlights the difficulty that graduates have in achieving the music teaching competences in the current training framework necessary to access the world of work, and it is therefore necessary to look more deeply into what and how their training should be in order to meet the demand for specialists in Music Education.