Making a Model Music Curriculum What’s right for your school?

Dr Liz Stafford considers how schools can ensure that their music curriculum meets the needs of their whole school community.

The notion of a ‘model’ curriculum is bizarre at best. A curriculum is not a document, it is a multi-faceted entity. It works best when it is grown and developed to suit the needs of pupils, by the teachers who are going to deliver it. Where our current National Curriculum excels is in the amount of flexibility educators have to create bespoke content and delivery modes to suit the needs of their school. A model curriculum which maps detailed content and specific teaching methodologies into each year group actually makes it more difficult for schools to deliver a quality experience for their pupils.

In order to design an effective music curriculum for your school, you need to take into account the following considerations.

Values, Mission and Purpose

The starting point for any curriculum design exercise is the question ‘why are we doing this?’ Before we can decide on content, delivery methods, resourcing, and assessment strategies, we must first consider what it is we want our pupils to get out of the music curriculum. The values and purpose inbuilt into our curriculum will vary from school to school but might include:

Establishing a life-long love of music

Preparing for further study at secondary school

Developing self-confidence, teamworking & leadership skills

Learning to respect music from a wide range of cultures

Meeting the requirements of the National Curriculum for music

Developing creative thinking, and self-expression

Having the chance to participate in musical activities that would otherwise be unavailable to them

Once we have established the purpose of our music curriculum, then and only then, can we can start to think about how we might deliver it.

Pupil aspirations and interests

We as teachers might think we know the purpose of our music curriculum, but how does that sit with the young people that we teach? In any curriculum design process, it is important to consider our own pupils, their interests and aspirations, whether these are directly applicable to the subject or not. With a subject like music, we also need to be acutely aware of the cultural background of our pupils, and the wider role that music plays in cultural identity.

There can be no curriculum content without context. And for a subject like music, which plays a so much wider part in our pupils’ lives than just during school hours, it is vital that our pupils buy-in to our curriculum by understanding how it is relevant to them.

Pupil consultation on curriculum design can be a tricky business, particularly when this process might result in requests from pupils to study music or artists that we might consider problematic from an educational perspective. However, involving pupils in the construction of our curriculum means that it will be more engaging, and have more impact, than if it is designed solely by adults to be ‘fed’ to children.

Staff confidence & skill

Once we have agreed our curriculum values and purpose, and consulted our pupils on what they would like included, we need to consider the level of confidence and skill in our teaching team. It is no good creating an ‘ambitious’ curriculum that can’t actually be taught due to staff needing specialist skills or extensive training!

This is where the idea of a curriculum being a flexible, ongoing process can be really helpful. Perhaps the curriculum of our dreams might be deliverable in a few years time after some training and development, but until we get to that point, compromises will have to be made, and a plan for developing our workforce over time will need to be drawn up, financed and implemented.

Surveying staff about their level of confidence and musical skill at the start of the curriculum design process, alongside the work on values and purpose, and pupil voice, is vital. Otherwise a lot of wasted work may be carried out on creating content that is simply not deliverable.

Availability of resources

We might think that once we have the information about the purpose of our curriculum, our pupils’ ideas for making it engaging, and have assessed our teachers ability to deliver it, we might be ready to start talking about content. Well… yes and no!

An important part of the curriculum design process is thinking about the resources needed to deliver our curriculum, including the resource of time itself. There is no point developing a curriculum that requires an hour a week of input if our timetable will only allow for 45 minutes, and equally

there is no point creating content which requires specific resources to deliver it unless we know there is budget to purchase these. As we start to think about the content of our curriculum, we need to be realistic about the amount of time and cost of resources needed to deliver it effectively. Again, perhaps we will need to start with a ‘plan A’ while we fundraise so that we can implement our dream curriculum in the future.

The place of commercial schemes of work

You might be thinking, based on everything you’ve just read, that a commercial curriculum scheme of work must therefore be a ‘bad’ thing? Fortunately that is not necessarily the case, although like any resource it is of course possible to use a commercial scheme of work badly!

With music being one of the subjects that teachers are often least confident about, a bought-in scheme of work can be a great starting place until you gain confidence to implement your own ideas that are personalised to your school community. The mainstream, market-leading schemes of work such as Charanga, Kapow, and Music Express, come with curriculum documentation which will help you understand how and why the lessons have been designed in that particular way, and provide a costeffective ‘one stop shop’ for teaching resources, to which you just need to add a basic collection of classroom instruments.

Over time as you gain confidence, you will start the process of questioning these schemes of work, and finding areas where you think it would be better to do things differently. This is the point at which you can take control of the curriculum, going back through the process outlined in this article, and seeing how all your existing resources might fit into your own bespoke curriculum. This may result in you continuing to use the scheme if it is meeting the purpose of your curriculum, or mixing and matching it with different resources, or moving entirely to your own scheme which you create and resource yourself.

Curriculum Design is a continuous process

It is important to remember that the process of curriculum design is a continuous cycle that can’t be completed in one go - or ever! Even when you think you’ve finally implemented your curriculum of dreams, something simple like a change in staffing, or a key resource breaking without the budget for it to be replaced, can knock you back a few steps. You might find a different cohort of children respond completely unexpectedly to your curriculum, and you will almost definitely find that aspects of it become quickly out of date. (I guarantee that sea shanties will no longer be ‘cool’ this time next year!)

As Finney stated in 2017 ‘The music curriculum can be defined as a dynamic set of musical processes and practices framed within historical and contemporary cultural discourse and dialogue that comprise the material encounters of pupils and teachers.’ It is not a list of repertoire or a set of instructions but a flexible entity with, perhaps, a life of its own!