5 minute read
Music Development Plans
Escaping the tyranny of the template, by Dr Liz Stafford
In May, teachers in England were suprised by an announcement by the Department for Education (DfE) that they should publish a summary of their Music Development Plan on their website for the upcoming academic year.
The surprise for some was the requirement to publish their plan, and for others the surprise was that such a plan should even exist!
Let’s bust some myths straight away. Schools are not required to create a Music Development Plan or publish it on their website. The National Plan for Music Education (NPME) is a non-statutory document which makes the suggestion that schools should produce a development plan, but there is no legal requirement to put this into place. Ergo, it is not a requirement to publish one, because you can’t publish something that doesn’t exist!
All that being said, it’s not necessarily a bad idea to create a Music Development Plan for your school. It can be a good way to really think about what you want music in your school to look like, and why. You are probably doing this in part already with a subject action plan for music, so the development plan is really just an extension and development of that existing process.
If you are going to write a music development plan, the first thing you shouldn’t do is look for a template! Although it can be comforting to have a structure to follow rather than a blank page in front of you, the minute you start using a template you are placing limitations on your vision for music.
In particular, the template provided by the DfE to publish on your website is problematic. The DfE do state that this is a template to summarise your plan, but already I have seen multiple schools filling this in as if it is the plan. The problem with this is that particular template does not encourage a robust planning process at all; in fairness to the DfE, it’s not designed to as, again, it is a summary template! What it provides is a series of boxes to talk about your music offer across the curriculum, cocurricular (instrumental lessons and ensembles) and enrichment (workshops, performances and concerts), and then a statement about future plans. Using this template as the plan is not going to help you critically engage with your music offer.
The process that I would advocate for development planning begins not with the ‘what’ but with the ‘why.’ Why do you do music in your school in the first place? What do you want your pupils to get out of it? What about the wider school community as a whole? This has to be your starting point for a robust planning process; if you start with the ‘what’ - the activities and content - you will end up with a plan that is bitty and at worst incoherent.
Once you’ve decided why you’re doing music, you will know what to plan in terms of content and activities for your music programmes, whether that be the curriculum, co-curricular, or enrichment activities. But first you need to check on what is already taking place.
You will want to audit current provision to see what’s working and what’s not, and how far away you are currently from achieving your vision. You will consult with pupils and teachers, and perhaps parents, to ascertain whether your music offer is meeting all parties’ needs.
Once you know where you are, and where you want to get to, it’s a case of filling in the gaps inbetween the two. I like SMART targets for this process, because they really make you think about what you can actually achieve in what timeframe. As you’re drawing these up, a suitable structure for your plan will probably start to become clear to you.
The DfE through the NPME and their template are steering schools towards a structure using curriculum, co-curricular and enrichment as headings, but you might feel that these are artificial barriers. For example if in fact one of your aims is to improve musical confidence in pupils (or teachers!) the work towards that aim will be happening across all three areas, so it would make more sense for curriculum, cocurricular and enrichment to sit under a heading of musical confidence, not the other way around.
The DfE have been clear that schools should create a plan in a structure and format that works for them, so despite the fact that they have issued a (summary, remember!) template, you should feel free to forge your own path.
When it comes to publishing a summary of the plan on your school website, I think if you’ve gone to all the trouble of creating a plan then it makes sense to share this with your whole school community, and the website is a logical mechanism for that.
However, if your Development Plan is going to be effective, it will need to be a working document, which means you’ll be constantly checking in with it to evaluate progress, and probably tweaking it as you go along. For this reason, I would probably provide it as a download rather than embedded text on your website, so that when you make changes you can quickly upload the latest version, to avoid painful conversations about coding and workflow with whoever is in charge of your website!
