Yeah, but do they win the 2p if they get it right?  Perhaps if you made it £2 instead of 2p you'd have them all singing Allegri's Miserere at sight in a couple of months    Start them singing on a truly "professional" basis

Does anyone still use Kodaly hand-signing, or is that old hat these days?

I've been tempted by such thoughts in the past

Leave things long enough, and they come back into fashion.  I saw a colleague using it only a few weeks ago (with cornets playing five-note melodies), I know others who do make use of it, and it's something I wish I was more familiar with.

There seems to be several elements to this.  The first is the general question of adjusting education to fit with realities.  There's a danger that this overlaps into politician-style tinkering, with a desire to see immediate results.  The reality is that even a fundamental change in education will not produce noticeable results for the wider world in anything less than a decade or two.  Even if education does keep pace with technological progress, the impression can be that it is not doing so - an 18-year-old leaving school today obviously can't have been taught using today's technology for the past fourteen years!

There's also perhaps the fact that some parts of education are by their very nature backward-looking, and I mean this without it having automatically negative connotations, and music notation certainly is a point where this is prominent.  It is very much about connections with traditions, not only those of European notated music, but also the interdependent ones of instruments themselves.  While I accept that we might move to a point where notation is at least far less connected with the physical act of creating it, nonetheless I am sure that actually putting pencil to paper will remain an invaluable way of understanding how various aspects of notation came into being.

I'm not entirely convinced that changes in educational approach are always directly the result of government strictures - I do think some come from within the educational world itself - though many occur as an indirect result of government policies, especially as affect the financial situation of educational establishments.

That said, in terms of higher education there has been a significant increase in numbers of students entering higher education in recent times. Now some might say that's a mixed blessing - because it has arguably entailed a lowering of standards in order to make it possible for more to enter - but all things told I do think it's a positive development (there's a big problem when higher education was the preserve of a very small elite - which it was up until the 1960s, in much of Europe, and still was to an extent up until recent times). And a system that aims for a wider section of the populace is going to entail changes, different priorities from those which suited the higher classes that were previously the primary beneficiaries. And in my experience, it's often students and parents who are pushing for a different, more 'relevant' approach to education, or else they will vote with their feet. Now, we might say that they don't necessarily know what's best for them, but should we really disregard their wishes? Which are often much more career-focused than we might like.

That's as may be, but they're standardised and available in downloadable fonts.