Music across the UK

In the first of a series of articles, we explore the different approaches taken by each country of the UK to the music curriculum

Scotland

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) aims to provide a broad general education by placing learners at the heart of their education. CfE is designed to provide children with opportunities to develop the knowledge, skills and attributes they need to adapt, think critically and flourish in today’s world. The curriculum is guided by four fundamental capacities –successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, and effective contributors –and organised into eight curriculum areas, with Expressive Arts being one.

Within CfE, the greatest benefit and challenge of teaching music is the same –flexibility and freedom. As a teacher, you have complete control over what you teach, how you teach it, and when you teach it. This results in teachers feeling either great enthusiasm or great concern. There are five levels to the curriculum, with recommended Experiences and Outcomes, and Benchmarks for each level, with pupils moving between levels when deemed appropriate by their teacher. Again, the fluidity and flexibility of this process leaves teachers feeling either great enthusiasm or great concern. So, how can teachers best approach music to help ensure they provide their pupils with a broad general education that prepares them for life in the 21st Century?

For me the answer is in a way that best serves you as a teacher, and the pupils you have in your care. With flexibility and freedom comes great opportunity for meeting the needs of your pupils. For example, at 2nd Level, which is recommended for pupils between Primary 5 and 7, one of the Experiences and Outcomes is –I can sing and play music from a range of styles and cultures, showing skill and using performance directions, and/ or musical notation. As you can see, this provides great flexibility and freedom. There is great flexibility to engage pupils in a blend of repertoire that includes music that you value, and music they value. These choices can also be linked to the other curriculum areas, or not, depending on the needs of your pupils.

Another example is –Inspired by a range of stimuli, and working on my own and/or with others, I can express and communicate my ideas, thoughts and feelings through musical activities. Again, this allows the teacher to place the pupils at the heart of their musical learning. Pupils can bring their own ideas, thoughts, and feelings to the creative process, which the teacher can help to facilitate in a way that best serves their pupils.

These two Experiences and Outcomes alone are clear examples of how the flexibility and freedom inherent in CfE could be overwhelming for many teachers –what to do, where to start, how to progress, what and how to assess? While there are clear answers to all of these questions, there is not enough time in one article to unpack them all!

If you would like to know more about implementing the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, Music Education Solutions will be running a series of webinars later this term. Please join our mailing list to be notified of dates and times!

Vaughan Fleischfresser

Vaughan Fleischfresser is Music Education Solutions’ Curriculum Consultant for Scotland. He teaches at the Edinburgh Academy Junior School, having previously been the Teaching Fellow in Music Education at Edinburgh University. @VFleischfresser

Wales

In January of this year, the new Curriculum for Wales was released, in advance of schools having to adopt it by 2022. This innovative new curriculum is built holistically around the ‘purposes’ of education, blurring the boundaries between individual subjects, and acknowledging that knowledge and skills bridge the gaps between individual subjects. The focus is very much on developing pupils as learners and citizens, and much less about stuffing them with knowledge!

This new curriculum is an extremely exciting development for many reasons. I particularly like the fact that music is grouped into ‘Expressive Arts’ and that teachers have the option to teach these subjects independently or interdependently. The possibilities for delivering music, dance and drama through ‘performing arts’ style projects are obvious. On a smaller scale there is scope for non-verbal response to music through movement and drama, allowing pupils to develop the expressive capabilities of their bodies, and supporting them to articulate concepts which they may not be able or willing to verbalise.

I also love the fact that the curriculum specifically articulates that both breadth and depth of study should be achieved. This, I think, will be a godsend to music as it will help schools move away from a focus on variety of experience to a focus on breadth of learning. Schools will have the freedom to make meaningful connections between different styles and genres studied, in order to provide both breadth and depth.

Each discipline within the expressive arts has its own set of subject-specific considerations. For music these are:

pitch, melody, dynamics, texture, tempo, timbre, rhythm, metre, form and structure, tonality, musical devices (e.g. repetition, ostinato, sequence), harmony, intonation

binary, ternary, rondo, round, minuet and trio, strophic, theme and variation, through-composed, sonata

performing (including vocal, instrumental, technology e.g. DJ-ing), improvising and composing (including vocal, instrumental, acoustic, electric and digital, editing/production), listening (including analysing, evaluating, and appreciating a range of musical forms and styles across genres and periods of time)

Curriculum for Wales (2020)

As someone who currently teaches in England the first thing to say is HURRAH for the use of ‘rhythm’ rather than ‘duration’ in this terminology! How nice to have vocabulary that is actually ‘a thing’ in music!

Also the addition of ‘form’ as well as ‘structure’ is really important, as these are in fact different concepts; my English colleagues all have different opinions as to whether structure is a stand-in for ‘form’ (like ‘duration’ is for rhythm) or whether it means something else.

To further elucidate the curriculum, it is great to see some actual examples given of musical forms that might be studied, rather than just leaving it up to the teachers to work out what on earth that might entail, as the English curriculum does! I also love the fact that pitch, melody, harmony and intonation are all included in the list. Again in England at primary level we just have ‘pitch’ in our list of ‘inter-related dimensions of music’ which rather encourages a cursory ‘high and low’ discussion and then no further exploration! The inclusion of intonation in particular excites me as it makes a link between theoretical concepts and practical skill –showing why pitch is important.

I think it’s great to see technology woven in to the performing and improvising/composing strands. The English primary music curriculum mentions technology in the opening statement, but then it never appears again so it is completely unclear how to integrate the use of appropriate technologies into lessons! This also unwittingly encourages the ‘classicalisation’ of music education, so the fact that this new Welsh curriculum specifically highlights skills like DJ-ing is a really positive step towards the decolonisation of music in schools.

Perhaps one of my favourite parts of this curriculum is the focus on ‘analysing, evaluating, and appreciating a range of musical forms and styles across genres and periods of time.’ Not for Wales the directive to study ‘the history of music’ (which doesn’t exist in a singular form) and the shadowy ghosts of ‘the great composers’ (which we all suspect were shoehorned in by a certain former Education Minister!) Instead there is a musical approach to the study of how forms and styles have developed and changed as a result of different influences over time. What amazing freedom –to be able to pick a form or a style and make meaningful musical connections across centuries and continents! Such a long way away from creating a timeline of composers’ birth and death dates, and colouring in a picture of Beethoven’s head!

I think I might move to Wales!

Dr Liz Stafford

Dr Liz Stafford is Editor of Primary Music Magazine, Director of Music Education Solutions, and Senior Lecturer at Leeds College of Music. @DrLizStafford