The roundtable “Bridging Research and Policy: Rethinking How We Shape Music Education for All” took place on 22 July 2026 as part of the ISME Commission on Policy: Culture, Education and Media Pre-Conference Seminar in Toronto, Canada. Jointly organised by the Music Education Policy Group (MEP Group) and the ISME Policy Commission, the 90-minute hybrid session brought together policy-makers, policy influencers and researchers to explore how research could more effectively inform and strengthen music education policy. The panel featured Kateřina Klementová (Ministry of Culture, Czech Republic), Hannah Fouracre (Arts Council England), Tuulikki Laes (University of the Arts Helsinki) and Patrick Schmidt (Columbia University), and was moderated by Bridget Whyte (Music Mark/MEP Group). 

The discussion highlighted that bridging research and policy depended on relationships, communication and sustained engagement rather than simply producing more evidence. Participants stressed the importance of building stable connections over time and of researchers understanding the political and institutional contexts in which policy-makers operated. Equally, policy-makers often needed support to interpret specialist research, particularly as many were not specialists in music, the arts or education. Onboarding policy-makers was therefore identified as an important part of relationship-building: accessible research or thematic overviews, short summaries, simple data visualisations and infographics could help new policy-makers quickly understand the context, evidence and key issues. Research nevertheless needed to remain rigorous and faithful to the evidence while being communicated differently for different audiences and, crucially, to offer possible solutions rather than relying on a “crisis narrative”. One approach discussed was for researchers to start with the problems and priorities that policy-makers themselves were seeking to address, rather than beginning with a music or arts education agenda: approaching them with the question “How can I help?” and demonstrating how research and expertise could contribute to solving their wider policy challenges, even where these were not initially related to music or the arts. The conversation therefore moved beyond a simple model of transmitting research findings towards co-production and longer-term knowledge exchange, creating shared spaces for dialogue and involving educators and communities affected by policy. Intermediary organisations, including membership bodies such as the MEP Group, were identified as potentially important connectors between research and policy. The roundtable pointed towards sustained, participatory relationships between researchers, policy-makers, practitioners and communities as a more effective route to turning evidence into meaningful and lasting music education policy.