Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A group of pupils at Coventry AP Academy, a school in the English Midlands, have been told that a pop star is visiting, but they don\u2019t know who. Six teenagers, four boys and two girls, are sprawled on a sofa and sitting at chairs in the small soundproofed music room when the door opens and one of the world\u2019s most famous musicians enters. \u201cIt\u2019s Ed Sheeran!\u201d a boy cries, leaping to his feet, astonished.Sheeran, 33, in light-blue hoodie, dark trousers and trainers with pink laces, returns their excited greetings. He places himself at the end of the sofa next to a grinning girl who hugs a cushion close to her in a pinch-me-am-I-dreaming way. First to perform is Jamie, 16. He stands with a microphone and raps a song he has written, an apology to his mother for causing trouble. \u201cNo matter what I do, you\u2019ll always be true,\u201d he volleys fluently into the mike.\u201cGreat flow,\u201d Sheeran compliments him. Jamie, delighted, flush with pride, replies: \u201cI know.\u201d He tells the star he was singing one of Sheeran\u2019s songs in the car on the way to school that morning. \u201cBefore you go,\u201d he says, \u201cI need a picture to show my mum.\u201d\u00a0Sheeran cheerfully accedes. It\u2019s one of numerous selfies, group photos and video messages that he will pose for during his two-day whistle-stop tour of schools and youth music schemes across Britain. The occasion is the official launch earlier this month of the Ed Sheeran Foundation, a charity he has set up to boost music education in state schools and improve access to the music industry. The itinerary begins in Cardiff, before the 120-mile drive to Coventry. The following day will be spent in Edinburgh in the morning and Belfast in the afternoon.\u00a0The foundation\u2019s genesis came several years ago when Sheeran had a cup of tea with his old music teacher, Richard Hanley. Sheeran, the most famous alumnus of Thomas Mills High School in Framlingham, Suffolk, was shocked to discover how little was being spent annually on music. \u201cMaths, science and English were getting 30 grand, and I was like: \u2018Why is music getting 700 quid?\u2019\u201d he tells me when I join him in Coventry.In 2019, he founded a charity to address the situation. The initial beneficiary was his former school, a state secondary in a small market town in the east of England. Sheeran left it aged 16 in 2007 in order to roll the dice as a singer-songwriter, trekking the length and breadth of the UK gigging and busking.\u201cThere were teachers encouraging me to do a safe set of A-levels, go to a safe university, do a safe degree and essentially do something I didn\u2019t want to for the rest of my life \u2014 because music wasn\u2019t a \u2018real\u2019 job,\u201d he says. \u201cBut my dad was like, \u2018If you do what you love, it doesn\u2019t matter how much you get paid for it, as long as you can make some sort of living from it.\u2019 So leaving early from school was essentially me doing my apprenticeship.\u201dThomas Mills High School now has a recording studio and 30 Apple Mac computers with the music production software Logic, thanks to Sheeran. His first charitable foundation also donated to other schools, but the set-up was amateur. \u201cUp until now, it was my old music teacher and someone that I worked with at the studio,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019d take applications, and we\u2019d sift through them and send out grants.\u201d\u00a0The thing I find most baffling is that the arts are one of our main exports, the thing we\u2019re proudest of as a nation\u2019The Ed Sheeran Foundation is the scaled-up successor to the earlier venture. The singer\u2019s tour of the UK is a fact-finding mission with his team. Alongside the selfies, he spends a lot of time while I am with him in Coventry being briefed in rooms furnished with breeze-blocks, whiteboards and inspiring slogans pinned on walls (\u201cChildren are not an interruption to your day, they are the reason for it\u201d).\u00a0The decor \u2014 functional, institutional, inexpensive \u2014 illustrates that British state schools, which educate about 93 per cent of the country\u2019s children, do a lot with comparatively little. Spending cuts and inflation have brought acute budgetary pressures. Music provision is suffering.A 2022 survey of music teachers by the Independent Society of Musicians reported mean yearly budgets of about \u00a32,000 for music departments in state schools, compared with almost \u00a310,000 in private schools. Last academic year, there was an annual rise of almost 9 per cent in students at all schools doing the subject at GCSE level, the academic qualification taken by 15-16-year-olds. But the long-term trend is downwards, with a 30 per cent fall in numbers between 2014 and 2023. More than 40 per cent of state schools don\u2019t enter a single pupil for music GCSE, according to campaigning group the Cultural Learning Alliance.\u00a0\u201cThe thing that I find most baffling is that the arts are one of our main exports and the thing we\u2019re proudest of as a nation,\u201d Sheeran says. \u201cNo one\u2019s talking about our arms deals or our bankers in a positive sense. But everyone\u2019s talking about the artists we produce, our musicians and songwriters and producers. I don\u2019t know where the government thinks the next generation is going to come from.\u201dHe is speaking, between bites of a teatime pickled egg, in the back of a car as we head across Coventry in the winter darkness to another school. Even for a touring musician, Sheeran\u2019s schedule is packed. He gets briefed multiple times and does several question-and-answer sessions during his afternoon in the city. He repeats the same advice to tyro musicians \u2014 \u201cDon\u2019t be afraid of failure\u201d, \u201cTreat songwriting like it\u2019s a diary\u201d \u2014 with unflagging engagement. The odd F-bomb is dropped, in contravention of school rules. (\u201cAnd he swears!\u201d a girl says amid laughter in the music studio where Jamie does his rapping.)\u201cHonestly, I feel mad energised,\u201d Sheeran tells me. \u201cIt\u2019s so different than doing a press run. You feel like you\u2019re doing something.\u201dI was lucky to have a music teacher who encouraged me . . . He didn\u2019t necessarily understand what I was doing, but he encouraged it. I think we\u2019re losing that\u2019Next stop is Barr\u2019s Hill School, where Sheeran meets music teachers from across Coventry. He leans against an upright piano in the music room, fists thrust into the pockets of his hoodie, asking them about the challenges they face. Then eight pupils from Barr\u2019s Hill file into the room, dressed in the jackets and ties of their school uniform, agog to find themselves in the presence of a megastar.\u00a0They quiz him about his initial ambitions (\u201cMy goal wasn\u2019t to be a well-known musician, I just wanted to sing a lot and get better\u201d) and his worst worries when starting out (\u201cFear of failure\u201d). The dignitary is ceremonially presented with a bottle of ketchup with the school\u2019s name on its label. \u201cThis is going to get used,\u201d Sheeran says, holding it up. Then we go upstairs to a large octagonal performance space.\u00a0It\u2019s filled by a huge big band made up of scores of musicians and singers from five Coventry schools, convened under a publicly funded programme called SoundLab-Cov. They play a song written by one of the singers, a rumbling rock number with a hint of Velvet Underground to it. Afterwards, Sheeran plugs in his acoustic guitar and sings his 2017 hit \u201cPerfect\u201d to whoops and applause.The song is a tender doo-wop ballad about his wife Cherry Seaborn, whom he met at school. That was also when he began songwriting. \u201cI was lucky enough to have a music teacher who encouraged me,\u201d he says of Richard Hanley. \u201cHe\u2019s a classically trained music teacher, plays the trumpet, very much puts the orchestra together. He didn\u2019t necessarily understand what I was doing, but he encouraged it. And I think we\u2019re losing that.\u201dWith Sheeran as its sole funder, the Ed Sheeran Foundation aims to help financially: the schools and organisations he visits during his two-day UK tour receive donations. But Sheeran\u2019s sights are set higher than one-off gifts or grants. The foundation is working to link up businesses, local councils and central government. Sheeran wants young people to be made aware of the wide range of jobs in the UK music industry, whose workforce numbered 216,000 in 2023. He reckons that music teaching needs to be shaken up. The GCSE syllabus is dominated by music theory and classical instruments. The kind of music we have heard in Coventry \u2014 rap, drum and bass, rock \u2014 is under-represented.\u00a0\u201cThis isn\u2019t me saying people shouldn\u2019t be playing clarinet,\u201d Sheeran insists. \u201cI actually think classical music is hugely important. Because we do produce amazing classical composers, amazing classical musicians, film and TV composers: that\u2019s the sector my brother works in.\u201d (His older sibling Matthew is a classically trained soundtrack composer.) \u201cBut there needs to be a balance. There\u2019s nothing in the school curriculum that caters for people like me.\u201dThe UK\u2019s new Labour government has promised to improve arts education, with an emphasis on working-class participation. A national curriculum review is currently under way, and is due to publish recommendations this year.\u201cI would love to be involved,\u201d Sheeran says. \u201cWhat I don\u2019t want is just a lot of nodding, smiling promises and then nothing to happen. Because that happens a lot. For me, personally, this is something that I believe in and it\u2019s something that I feel I can have some form of an influence to help change. So I\u2019m going to do it.\u201dHis final destination in Coventry is The Tin Music and Arts, a venue that works with Coventry Music Service, which administers the city\u2019s youth music budget (the total comes to almost \u00a310 per school-age child each year: less than the price of an album). After another question-and-answer session, during which we learn that the trainers with the pink laces were given to him when he did a music video with US rap star Travis Scott \u2014 a thrill runs through the room at the mention of his name \u2014 Sheeran takes to the stage to play \u201cPerfect\u201d once again.\u00a0During the song, he spots a 13-year-old girl singing along at the side of the stage and invites her to join him. She stands at a microphone stand, harmonising with him quite superbly. Her foster carer is moved to tears as she exits the stage. The girl is autistic. When she joined her foster family aged six, she was non-verbal. Music taught her how to speak \u2014 specifically Sheeran\u2019s songs, which she discovered on Spotify and became obsessed by. She would sing snatches of them to her foster carers as a way of communicating with them.Afterwards, Sheeran learns about the history of his duet partner. This time, he is the one to be astonished. \u201cIt just makes you feel great,\u201d he says as he gets back into the car, off for the next leg of his mission.\u00a0edsheeranfoundation.comFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A group of pupils at Coventry AP Academy, a school in the English Midlands, have been told that a pop star is visiting, but they don\u2019t know who. Six teenagers, four boys and two girls, are sprawled on a sofa and sitting at chairs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":170717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-170716","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170718,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170716\/revisions\/170718"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}