Recent research emphasises the benefits of learning music:

• Music helps children to learn maths. "When children learn rhythm, they are learning ratios, fractions and proportions," says Professor Gordon Shaw, University of California, Irvine, after his study of seven year-olds in Los Angeles.

• Music enhances social skills. "Children who take part in music develop higher levels of social cohesion and understanding of themselves and others, and the emotional aspect of musical activities seems to be beneficial for developing social skills like empathy," says Dr. Alexandra Lamont, Lecturer in the Psychology of Music at the University of Keele

• Music enhances your child's intellectual development. Dr. Frances Rauscher, from the University of Wisconsin, says that music "helps improve children's ability to reason abstractly, by strengthening neural firing patterns of the brain that are relevant to both musical and spatial cognition."

• Music encourages self-expression and self confidence. As a non-verbal language, music can convey a complexity of emotions, and offers a means of expression to a shy or diffident child who finds it hard to communicate through speech.