Aims and purpose
This curriculum develops pupils as musicians, fostering a deeper understanding of the subject as a platform for a lifelong connection with music. Through performance, composition and engaged listening, pupils develop their musicianship and experience a diverse range of musicians and styles, enabling them to embrace creativity and expression and build their understanding of and confidence in making music both individually and with others.
Curriculum principles
Knowledge and vocabulary rich
This principle recognises the important role that knowledge, and vocabulary as a particularly important type of knowledge, play in learning. Our curriculum acknowledges the complexities of musical understanding and that knowledge of music needs teaching through interaction with musical sound. As such, there is a focus on practical music-making and engaged listening tasks that develop aural skills.
Sequenced and coherent
A careful and purposeful sequencing of our curriculum content underpins the design of our curriculum, ensuring that pupils are able to build on and make links with existing knowledge. At its simplest this means ensuring, for example, that pupils explore rhythm patterns by clapping before being introduced to musical notation. Attention is paid to vertical coherence via threads, which map the developments of concepts over time. For example, the thread ‘Creating, composing and improvising’ includes units that are focused on building up the composites in composing successfully. At key stage 1, pupils will explore simple starting points such as unpitched patterns and small note cells, through to using the pentachord and 5-note raags in key stage 2.
Evidence-informed
Our evidence-informed approach enables the rigorous application of research outcomes, science of learning and impactful best practice both in education in general and at a subject specific level. For example, the design of our resources reflects findings from Sweller’s cognitive load theory and Mayer’s principles of multimedia learning whilst our lesson design draws on Rosenshine’s principles of instruction. The curriculum focuses on the development of musical understanding through a focus on practical and creative music making and exploration of sound. Creative tasks are supported by pupils achieving the required domain specific knowledge needed to make appropriate musical choices. Performance tasks allow for the time needed for pupils to develop both their technical ability and expressive qualities. The curriculum aims to develop pupils as musicians, taking into account the complexity of knowledge of music, how pupils learn in music and the importance of appropriate sequencing in encouraging pupils to make connections across styles and develop a meaningful understanding of music.
Diverse
Our commitment to breadth and diversity in content, language, texts and media can be seen throughout the curriculum.This is particularly noticeable through the choices of repertoire, genres and styles in the curriculum. Breadth and depth are balanced to ensure that pupils have a strong understanding of both the differences and similarities of music and musical heritage around the world, and the curriculum embraces and celebrates a wide variety of musicians.
We aim to teach music from different cultures and traditions authentically, ensuring that the characteristics of the music drive the learning and the history and context of the styles are acknowledged.
Accessible
Our curriculum is intentionally designed to facilitate high-quality teaching as a powerful lever to support pupils with SEND. Lessons are chunked into learning cycles, practical tasks are scaffolded through use of success criteria and redundant images and information are minimised to manage cognitive load. Our music curriculum embraces singing, acknowledging the importance of the voice as our principal instrument and a learning tool for the development of musical literacy.
Subject principles
Develops pupils as musicians through performing, engaged listening, composing and improvising
We focus on knowledge and skills that develop pupils’ musicianship through practical music-making and engaged listening tasks. Content centres around developing knowledge of music (rather than about music) to ensure pupils develop a worthwhile understanding of the music they are learning about. Performance tasks consider expression, instrumental fluency, ensemble skills and accessibility. At key stage 2 the nuances of how to practise effectively and how to work as an ensemble are taught explicitly. Composition tasks promote development of creativity through a balance of artistic freedom and structured stylistic and theoretical guidance. Listening to, engaging with and understanding music is integral to the curriculum, as is developing an understanding of the musical elements.
Develops understanding of the elements of music and how these elements combine expressively through their application in sound
Understanding, recognising and the practical application of the musical elements in performance, composition and engaged listening is sequenced over time, and vocabulary and the application of the elements becomes more sophisticated as the units progress. For example, lessons introduce musical elements in turn, teaching how they can be altered to affect outcomes. This lays the foundation for more sophisticated application of the elements overtime.
Sequences learning over time which:
- Builds musical knowledge, techniques and specialist language;
- Promotes the understanding of a diverse range of genres, traditions and styles;
- Develops pupils analytical skills in responding to different types of music.
Units are carefully sequenced over time to ensure knowledge of music is developed incrementally and with the time needed to embed practical skills, nurture creative skills and secure understanding of key musical terminology. The curriculum develops aural skills and promotes understanding of the musical elements and how to use them. Pupils are given the tools to articulate their understanding of and respond to and appreciate a diverse range of music from different genres and cultures.
Promotes co-curricular learning for all pupils through signposting to opportunities beyond the classroom.
Practical music-making is at the heart of this curriculum. This is shown through a major focus on singing during key stages 1 and 2, the explicit teaching of practice and ensemble skills, and a range of approaches to composing creatively and joyful examples of making music together. It is through this active musical curriculum that we hope to inspire young musicians to continue their learning beyond the classroom, and set them up to take advantage of wider music opportunities in line with the National Plan for Music Education.
National curriculum
How does our curriculum reflect the aims & purpose of the national curriculum?
Our curriculum has been designed to reflect the aims and purpose of the national curriculum by supporting pupils to develop their knowledge of music and skills in music-making, instilling a love of music and musical learning as well as fostering creativity, expression and confidence.
The national curriculum has the aim that ‘pupils learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence’. In our curriculum, key stages develop the voice as the principal instrument, embracing the joy of singing together and the confidence this can develop. Concepts are taught and embedded through song. Pupils learn how and why they sing, and rehearsal and ensemble skills.
The national curriculum has the aim the ‘pupils understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the inter-related dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.’ Our curriculum focuses on performance, composition and engaged listening, through which pupils develop an understanding of the musical elements and how they can be used creatively and expressively. They will engage with and listen discriminatively to a diverse range of music from different times and places, ensuring they also meet the national curriculum aim that pupils ‘perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians’.