Intent

At St Wilfrid’s our music curriculum aims to help the children gain a firm understanding of the vastness and breadth of music.  It offers continuous opportunities for consolidation and learning through a spiral curriculum which includes listening and appraising, singing, playing, composing, improvising and performing across a wide variety of periods, styles, traditions, and musical genres. We are committed to developing a curiosity for the subject, as well as an understanding and acceptance of the validity and importance of all types of music, and an unbiased respect for the role that music may wish to be expressed in any person’s life. Children are encouraged and inspired to develop not only their knowledge and understand of music but also their own individual musical talents and skills.  Our music curriculum intends to inspire creativity, self-expression and to encourage our children on their musical journeys.  We hope to foster a lifelong love of music by exposing them to diverse musical experiences and igniting a passion for music and a desire to become musicians.

Implementation

Our curriculum is adapted from the ‘Charanga’ scheme of work which provides an innovative progression framework, covering the National Curriculum, where musical content is continually revisited and revised within a spiral curriculum.

Through the musical program, teachers are able to produce inclusive and challenging lessons for children to access the musical curriculum in a fun and engaging way, further promoting a love of learning.  Our lessons are planned in sequences to provide children with the opportunities to review, remember, deepen and apply their understanding.  Across the school, children will develop their knowledge, understanding and skills in 6 key areas: listening and appraising, singing, playing instruments, improvising, composing and performing.  Within their music journey, children will be given opportunities to play a range of untuned and tuned instruments developing their repertoire of these as they progress through the school, enabling a developing understanding of how to produce a range of notes and an ability to read basic music notation.  Children are given the opportunity to learn to play a range of musical instruments as they progress through school beginning with the Glockenspiel in Key stage 1, whilst children in lower key stage 2 will be introduced to the recorder and then the ukulele as they move into upper key stage 2.  Frequent opportunities will be provided for children to continue to rehearse and use the skills they have developed in these instruments as they continue their journey through the school.

Music in the wider curriculum

Across the school, and in addition to music lessons, children are given opportunities to take part in other musical events including singing assemblies, collective worship, masses, nativities, productions, performances and shows.  Children are encouraged to apply their knowledge and skills from music into their learning within other subjects and regularly perform to a range of different audiences for different purposes.  Opportunities are provided for children to take part in extracurricular clubs with peripatetic teachers including for choir and piano.

Impact

We recognise that music enables children to develop an understanding of culture and history and broadens their awareness of ethnicities across the world. Offering experiences linked to the integral nature of music creates an enormously rich palette of fundamental skills for children to access in life including: achievement, self-confidence, interaction, awareness of others, and self-reflection; preparing our children for the next stage in life.  We aim that by the time they leave our school children will have a wide repertoire of music which they will be able to use to create original, imaginative, fluent and distinctive music.  Pupils will be able to enjoy music, following their preferences in many ways either as a listener, creator or performer and have the opportunity to persue as they progress on in their journey.

The way pupils showcase, share, celebrate and perform their work will best show they impact of our curriculum.  We look for this impact through observing learning regularly, supporting and scaffolding children and reviewing live or recorded performances.  Progress of our musical curriculum is measure through outcomes and the record of coverage through our curriculum skills grids.