The big challenge of John Paynter's work in music education from the late 1960s on was that his approach to children's music was that of composer to composer. This was markedly at odds with the training of most music teachers at that time whose specialism – whose status even – was most likely to be rooted in their performance skills. For many teachers, composition was an entirely alien activity, with ‘real’ composers as distanced figures, to be approached through history and appreciation or possibly performance of their works.