Curriculum Vision and Music

All of the elements of our curriculum intent statement underpin our teaching of music. However, music provides particular opportunities for teaching the following aspects of our intent statement.

• Strand 3 a) iii) promote social and cultural development through a curriculum that encourages forgiveness and reconciliation, encouraging good mental health and enabling all to flourish and live well together. We will do this by: building a curriculum that fosters a sense of belonging, embracing and celebrating difference.

Purpose and Aims of Music

Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. A high quality music education should engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. As pupils progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon.

The national curriculum for music aims to ensure that all 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
• 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
• 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

Organisation of Teaching

The music curriculum is carefully and coherently sequenced to enable our children to develop a growing knowledge of the themes outlined above. Pupils’ knowledge builds towards clearly defined end points so teachers and leaders know what we expect our pupils to achieve by the end of each topic, each year and each key stage. To meet the educational needs of our school community we have selected the following core knowledge concepts as a focus for our teaching. These are explored in increasing depth as pupils move through the school.

• Listen and Appraise
• Composition
• Performance

Music is taught as a discrete subject, though meaningful links are made with other subjects in our curriculum (such as links to history through our ‘Blackbird unit looking at The Beatles and civil rights). The topics we teach are outlined in the curriculum map for music (see Appendix 1). This is published on our website.

To support the high quality knowledge rich teaching lessons we aim for, the school subscribes to ‘Charanga’ scheme of learning.  All teaching materials are adapted to meet the requirements of our Christian vision and curriculum intent.